Franky Zapata on his jet-powered “flyboard” flies past the belfry of the city hall of Calais (centre) after he took off from Sangatte, northern France, yesterday, during his attempt to fly across the 35-km (22-mile) Channel crossing in 20 minutes, while keeping an average speed of 140kph (87mph) at a height of 15-20m (50-65ft) above the sea. Page 11

First hoverboard Channel crossing

Gulf International Services H1 revenue rises to QR1.5bn

BUSINESS | Page 1

GULF TIMES

published in

QATAR

since 1978MONDAY Vol. XXXX No. 11266

August 5, 2019Dhul-Hijja 4, 1440 AH www. gulf-times.com 2 Riyals

SPORT | Page 1

ChampHamilton hunts down Verstappen for Hungary win

Amir condoles withPresident Trump

His Highness the Amir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani sent yesterday a cable of

condolences to US President Don-ald Trump on the victims of the two shooting incidents that took place in the states of Texas and Ohio, wishing the injured a speedy recovery. The Amir expressed strong condemna-tion of the crimes.

His Highness the Deputy Amir Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad al-Thani and HE the Prime Minister and Minister of Interior Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa al-Thani also sent cables of condo-lences to President Trump, wish-ing the injured a speedy recovery. Meanwhile, the Ministry of For-eign Aff airs strongly condemned the shooting incidents.

Democrats target Trump rhetoric for the latest massacresReutersWashington

Two mass shootings that killed 30 people in Texas and Ohio rever-berated across the United States’

political arena yesterday as Demo-cratic presidential candidates called for stricter gun laws and accused President Donald Trump of stoking racial ten-sions.

Dozens were also wounded on Sat-urday and early yesterday in shoot-ings within just 13 hours of each other in carnage that shocked a country that has become grimly accustomed to mass shootings and heightened concerns about domestic terrorism.

The fi rst massacre occurred on Sat-urday morning in the heavily Hispanic border city of El Paso, where a gunman killed 20 people at a Walmart store be-fore surrendering. Authorities in Texas said the rampage appeared to be a ra-cially motivated hate crime and federal

prosecutors are treating it as a case of domestic terrorism.

Across the country, a gunman opened fi re in a downtown district of Dayton, Ohio, early yesterday, killing nine people and wounding at least 26 others. The assailant was killed by po-lice.

The El Paso shooting reverberated on the campaign trail for next year’s US presidential election, with most Dem-ocratic candidates repeating calls for tighter gun control measures and some drawing connections to a resurgence in white nationalism and xenophobic politics in the United States.

Several 2020 candidates said Trump was indirectly to blame.

“Donald Trump is responsible for this. He is responsible because he is stoking fears and hatred and bigotry,” US Senator Cory Booker said on CNN’s State of the Union.

The Republican president called the El Paso shooting a “hateful act” and “an act of cowardice”. To Page 6

The US flag is seen at half-mast yesterday, near the site of a mass shooting where 20 people lost their lives at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.

HIA advises online check-in, other steps to avoid Eid rush

Hamad International Airport has advised passengers depart-ing during Eid al-Adha period

to ensure they check in online, arrive three hours prior to their fl ight and use e-gates (if registered) to avoid queues and “continue enjoying comfortable and seamless travel” through HIA.

Passengers travelling through HIA are reminded that check-in closes some 60 minutes prior to departure time. During security checks, passen-gers are requested to ensure that they are not carrying any prohibited items such as liquids, aerosols, and gels and to pack any liquid containers in a clear, re-sealable plastic bag with each being 100ml or less. New baggage wrapping centres are located near row 3 and 10 in the airport.

Electronic items larger than mobile phones need to be removed from bags and placed in trays for X-ray screen-ing. Small vehicles powered by lithium batteries, such as hoverboards, are prohibited for carriage. Passengers are also advised to minimise travelling with pets due to the holiday peak time.

For the convenience and safety of

passengers returning from Eid and summer holidays during the busy peak period, access to the arrival and depar-ture curbsides will be restricted to au-thorised vehicles only. Customers are encouraged to use the short-term car park facility during these periods.

It is worth noting that HIA has re-ported serving a total of 9.38mn pas-

sengers in the second quarter of 2019, making it the busiest second quarter the airport has seen. The record-break-ing second quarter saw passenger num-bers growing by 18.9% compared with the same quarter last year.

To accommodate this growth in its passengers, Qatar’s airport has suc-cessfully launched the fi rst phase of its ‘Smart Airport programme’, through which it has commissioned some 62 next-generation self-service check-in kiosks and 12 self-service bag drops spread across the terminal, enabling passengers to check in, print boarding passes and bag tags; tag their bags; and drop them at the bag drop before pro-ceeding to border control.

The swift process vastly improves customer experience and allows more

passengers to be managed without physical expansion of the check-in fa-cilities. It also empowers HIA passen-gers by off ering total control of their journey from arrival to departure.

This has proven to be extremely popular, with up to 40% of the home carrier Qatar Airways’ passengers pre-ferring to self-check-in; and a further 20% opting for self-bag-drop.

Passengers departing from HIA are advised to download the ‘HIAQatar’ mobile app available for both Andriod and iPhone for updates and to assist making the passengers journey more seamless with real-time information about fl ight status, baggage claim, time and direction to boarding gates and food, beverage and retail off ers from Qatar Duty Free (QDF).

QNTC off ers completeentertainment package

By Peter AlagosBusiness Reporter

The Qatar National Tourism Council (QNTC) has played a key role in fostering an upbeat

atmosphere in the country during the summer season, an offi cial of QSports has said.

On June 4, the QNTC launched the ‘Summer in Qatar’ (SiQ) programme 2019, which off ers diff erent types of events and activities to people stay-ing in the country during the summer break.

The SiQ “is part of the council’s wid-er strategy to diversify Qatar’s tourism off erings, and develop sustainable op-tions throughout the year,” QNTC stat-ed in a previous media statement.

Part of the SiQ programme is the ‘Summer Entertainment City’ (SEC), spearheaded by QSports, in collabo-ration with QNTC. SEC witnessed a tremendous run from June 4-July 13, attracting almost 60,000 people. It is set to reopen on August 9 at the Doha

Exhibition and Convention Centre in time for Eid al-Adha, it was announced recently.

“The QNTC has been playing a vital role in off ering people in Qatar with more options to enjoy the summer sea-son. The types of options that it has prepared for the local community are exceptional,” SEC head of Business De-velopment Unit Aya Kassab told Gulf Times yesterday.

Kassab noted that this year’s activi-ties are very diff erent compared to what people experienced in 2018.

“Aside from shopping extravagan-zas, the SiQ programme is highlighted by back-to-back performances, a lot of bands are coming in, as well as co-medians, and of course, the Summer Entertainment City, which is getting bigger and bigger every year,” she said.

For those who did not travel abroad this summer, Kassab said the QNTC had made sure that residents got “the whole entertainment package to assure that those staying in the country would really enjoy the summer.”

Earlier, QNTC’s Khalid al-Jumai-li attributed SiQ’s success to the council’s many partners for the pro-gramme, comprising more than 30 stakeholders.

Al-Jumaili said SiQ 2019 is a product of public and private sector collabora-tion between the Ministry of Com-merce and Industry, and Ministry of Municipality and Environment, Qatar Airways, Katara – the Cultural Village, Qatar Foundation, Private Engineering Offi ce, Katara Hospitality, Al Rayyan Hospitality, Marriott International Ho-tels, as well as nine participating malls, and other event partners, including QSports, Social Studios, Alchemy, and Radio One FM Qatar.

On the SEC’s reopening this coming Friday, al-Jumaili said he is optimistic that the observance of Eid al-Adha will usher in a large footfall to the Enter-tainment City, which will off er diff er-ent types of amusement rides, live en-tertainment shows, skills games, video games including virtual reality, as well as a wide choice of food stalls and retail shops.

Summer Entertainment City set to reopen on Aug 9 at the Doha Exhibition and Convention Centre

People place flowers yesterday beside a makeshift memorial outside the Cielo Vista Mall Walmart (background) where a shooting left 20 people dead in El Paso, Texas.

A woman cries during a vigil for the victims of the mass shooting that occurred at the Levitt Pavilion in Dayton, Ohio.

2 Gulf TimesMonday, August 5, 2019

QATARFM sends messages to S African minister

110 doping controloff icers attend QADC workshop

The Minister of International Relations and Co-operation of South Africa, Dr Naledi Pandor, has received two written messages from HE the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Aff airs Sheikh Mohamed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, related to the bilateral relations and ways of enhancing them. The messages were handed over by Qatar’s ambassador to South Africa, Abdullah Hussein al-Jaber, during his meeting with Minister of International Relations and Co-operation Dr Naledi Pandor.

The Qatar Anti-Doping Commission (QADC) organised a two-day fruitful workshop for doping control off icers at the Qatar Olympic Committee (QOC) headquarters. Around 110 doping control off icers from HMC and Ministry of Public Health took part in the workshop which focused on the vital role, responsibilities and goals of QADC over the coming period. During the workshop, trainees were briefed on the electronic examination system during the championships including the upcoming IAAF World Athletics Championships-Doha 2019 which will take place from September 27 to October 6.

Commercial Bank opens fi rst Metro-based branch at DECC

Commercial Bank has opened its fi rst Metro-based branch at the Doha

Exhibition and Convention Center (DECC) Metro Station (Red Line).

This, Qatar’s premier bank said is part of its commitment to Qatar National Vision 2030.

At the heart of Doha’s Central Business District, the Commer-cial Bank Metro Branch will of-fer convenient personal banking services for metro commuters,

including digital account open-ing services, instant cheque book as well as cash Services via self-service machines.

Amit Sah, Commercial Bank executive general man-ager and head (Retail Banking) said, “Metro initiative is an important part of upgrading the transport sector in Qatar, with State patronage. We are

pleased to partner this world class national development, by bringing in best-in-class convenience in banking to the travelling public and the com-munity at large. We believe that this will be the beginning of a fresh transformation and will define the next genera-tion of banking in the market-place.”

Reham Sabri Thawabi, assist-ant general manager and head (Branch Network) was pleased to announce the opening Metro Branch at the DECC station.

She said, Commercial Bank Metro Branch is “ready to re-ceive customers forthwith”, adding that, “this is the latest step in rolling out a diff erenti-ated branch strategy, seamlessly

blending digitalisation with brick and mortar, in sync with the times.

Branch services include self-service lobby, off ering state-of-the art house digital based services including combo ATMs, with cash withdrawal and de-posit features, in addition to housing a, on-demand cheque book-printing unit.

QRCS ‘Little Hearts’ project in Bangladesh concludesQatar Red Crescent Soci-

ety (QRCS) has complet-ed its successful “Little

Hearts” project in Dhaka, Bang-ladesh.

Over 10 days, the medi-cal team performed 79 cardiac catheterisations for the listed children, off ered more than 250 medical examinations, and re-ferred one patient to the depart-ment of open-heart surgery.

As the charitable task came to an end, the director of the Na-tional Institute of Cardiovascu-lar Diseases, which hosted the procedures, thanked the delega-tion for their great work, sending his special thanks to QRCS, the government and people of Qatar, and, particularly, the benevolent donors.

The staff of the embassy of Qatar in Dhaka had much to do in this success. They helped the delegation on arrival, transport-ed the medical materials to the hospital using their own cars, gave them all the facilities as re-quired, and escorted them until their departure to Doha.

QRCS’s delegation visited Bangladesh Red Crescent So-ciety (BDRCS) and met with its president, secretary-general, and board members. Amid ex-tensive media coverage, the meeting discussed the ongoing bilateral humanitarian projects and how to ensure eff ectiveness and sustainability.

Then, the group visited BDRCS’s Holy Family Hospi-tal, a major health facility in Dhaka. They took a tour of the various departments, spending more time at the dialysis cen-tre. Development projects were proposed to improve this vital

health facility, which serves thousands of families in the country.

Among the cases dealt with by the medical team were atrial septal defects, ventricular sep-tal defects, patent ductus ar-teriosus, aortic and pulmonary stenosis balloon valvuloplasty, right-side and left-side cathe-ters, diagnostic catheterisations, pre- and during-procedure echocardiography, transesopha-geal echocardiography, defi bril-lation, and coronary stents.

The delegation of QRCS featured Dr Mohamed Salah Ebrahim, executive director of Relief and International Division and head of del-egation; Dr Khaled Alam al-Huda, co-ordinator of medi-cal convoys; Dr Mohamed Tawfik Noaman, paediatric cardiologist and professor at the University of Texas; Dr Iad al-Amouri, paediat-ric cardiologist (Jordan); Dr

Hassan Ismael, paediatric anaesthetist (West Bank); Abdullah Ashkanani, senior catheterisation technician at Hamad Medical Corporation; and Qatari volunteers Aliaa

al-Maadheed and Tomador al-Boeneen, the founders of Box of Joy initiative, who distributed toys and gifts to the patients, with support from Qatar Airways.

At the heart of Doha’s Central Business District, the Commercial Bank Metro Branch will off er convenient personal banking services for metro commuters

Qatari professionalsdiscuss challenges of living abroadQatar National Library

hosted an informal talk that highlighted “The

Qatari Experience Abroad.” The Qatari professionals off ered their personal accounts of the challenges they faced, including cultural diff erences and home-sickness.

Dr Mohamed al-Hajri, assist-ant professor at the Community College of Qatar; Dr Khalid al-Shamari, assistant professor of public law at Qatar University; Dr Dhabia al-Mohannadi, as-sistant professor at Texas A&M University at Qatar; and Dana al-Meer, information services librarian at the library, each shared their stories and experi-ences living abroad.

The speakers also exchanged the “survival tips” they used

to overcome these diffi culties to achieve their personal goals while abroad.

Dr al-Hajri said, “Going abroad to study teaches students how to be culturally aware. Be-fore embarking on this experi-ence, it is very important for students to prepare by reading about the host country, its cul-ture and its people. It is also a must for students to get to know their new university and what it has to off er in advance.”

“Preparation is an important factor to be sure of a fulfi lling experience abroad. My advice to all students who are planning to go outside of Qatar to pursue their studies is to make use of the available resources at the li-brary, such as online resources, books and these workshops, to

prepare for a successful journey,” he added.

“Studying abroad prepares students to become more in-dependent and hard-working,” said Dana al-Meer. “My experi-ence pursuing studies in media and fi lmmaking outside Qatar was one of the most inspiring phases of my life. My advice to all students who want to study abroad is to follow their dreams and work hard to attain great achievements.”

Shweta Reddy, who attended the event, said, “I am planning on starting my graduate studies in the US in the near future. It was really useful to hear the ex-periences of these Qatari profes-sionals, and this event will surely help me prepare for a rewarding life while studying abroad.”

Qatari professionals share their experience at the event.

Al Jaidah Group supports Dreama with QR50,000

Roaming with Qatarna Packs, Ooredoo Passport now available in Lebanon

Ooredoo has announced that its popular Qa-tarna Packs and Oore-

doo Passport services are now available in Lebanon, expand-ing even further the extensive list of countries in which cus-tomers can use roaming serv-ices without worrying about large bills.

Qatarna customers travel-ling to Lebanon now can use up to 100Gb roaming data. Other pack users can activate an Ooredoo Passport for use during their stay, giving them access to great-value data and calls without risk of over-spending.

Once activated, an Ooredoo Passport instantly provides 1Gb of roaming data and 100 minutes, letting customers stay connected to friends and family while travelling.

For extra security, a new Ooredoo passport is automati-cally activated once allowances have been used up, so large roaming bills will not accrue.

If customers forget to acti-vate an Ooredoo Passport be-fore they travel, an Ooredoo Passport will automatically be

activated once roaming charges reach QR100, and activated again if allowances are used up, removing the risk of running up large roaming bills.

Manar Khalifa al-Muraikhi, director, PR and Corporate Communications at Ooredoo, said: “Our Ooredoo Passport off ers a great way to stay con-nected while keeping roaming costs down. Lebanon is a popu-lar destination for Qatari citi-zens and residents, and we’re delighted to off er this service there.”

Customers can sign up online via the Ooredoo app or at any Ooredoo shop.

Al Jaidah Group has made a donation of QR50,000 to the Orphanage Care

Centre, Dreama, it was an-nounced yesterday.

Vijay Kashyap, executive manager, Human Resources Division, Al Jaidah Group pre-sented the donation to Ahmed Hussain, director of the Sup-port Services Department at Dreama.

Dreama is specialised in pro-viding care to the orphans and those who lost the family sup-port.

The centre, established by Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, chairperson, Qatar Foundation in 2002, works under the umbrella of the Qatar Social Work Foun-dation.

Mariam bint Ali bin Nasser al-Misnad, executive direc-

tor, Dreama praised the social activity of Al Jaidah Group and

expressed her thanks to the management of the group for

presenting the fi nancial sup-port.

Dreama off icials presenting a plaque to Al Jaidah Group after receiving the donation.

Some of the team members of the project.

QRCS team conducts a surgery during the project.

Sheehaniya ensures veterinary supervision at slaughterhouses

The Health Control Sec-tion of Al Sheehaniya Municipality has chalked

out a plan to ensure availability of veterinarians at the mobile slaughterhouse during Eid al-Adha.

Veterinarians will be avail-able for the supervision of slaughtering from the fi rst day of Eid to the fourth day from 5am to 5pm.

The municipality has also reached into an agreement with Widam Food Company to provide enough number of butchers, cleaning staff , water tanks, and additional electric-ity generators throughout the Eid holidays.

Meanwhile, the Municipal-ity has issued a warning against violations including slaugh-tering livestock outside the authorised slaughterhouses, assigning unlicensed butchers who do not have health certi-

fi cation and slaughtering with-out veterinary supervision.

The health section has launched an inspection cam-

paign during which eateries and meat and poultry shops within the municipality limits were checked.

An off icial of Al Sheehaniya Municipality inspecting an item.

US-Talibantalks continuein DohaThe eighth round of talks between the United States and the Afghan Taliban, which began on Saturday, will continue in Doha to complement previous rounds aimed at achieving peace and stability in Afghanistan. In the previous round, held on June 29, the two sides stressed the importance of ending the suffering of the Afghan people who are looking for peace and the mutual desire of both sides to move quickly and make tangible progress. (QNA)

The Ministry of Municipality and Environment’s (MME) Department of Animal Wealth has announced that the eight veterinary service centres across country have become operational to update data about camels, including: change of owner, and attaching or removing microchips.Accordingly, the MME has urged breeders to avoid making any transaction for camels outside the authorised centres and warned that the ministry is not responsible for any update done without notifying the Department of Animal Wealth. Inquiries in this regard could be made through contacting 44261611 or 44261645.

The Consulate General of Qatar in Hong Kong has called on Qatar’s citizens, residents and visitors in Hong Kong to follow local news channels to find out where the demonstrations might take place in order to avoid them. The Consulate General asked Qatari nationals to contact the mission in case of emergency. Page 8

Veterinary service centres for camels data

Qataris in HK urged to avoid demo areas

QATAR3

Gulf Times Monday, August 5, 2019

Alfardan Sports Motors launches special off er on Alfa Romeo modelsAlfardan Sports Motors,

the authorised reseller of Alfa Romeo in Qatar, has

taken advantage of the summer to launch a special campaign aimed at helping sports car en-thusiasts own a brand-new Alfa Romeo.

Extending across the Alfa Romeo range, including the Guilia, Stelvio, and Giulietta, the ‘summer off er’ comes with a starting price of QR109,000 and includes service and war-ranty for fi ve years or 120,000km (whichever comes fi rst).

Combining distinctive Italian design with a more upscale in-terior and sporty performance, the all-new Giulia is one of the most stunning sports sedans in recent memory. The range in-

cludes Giulia, Super, Veloce, and Quadrifoglio.

The base Giulia features 17-inch dark wheels, and a 6.5-inch infotainment display, to name but a few. The Giulia Super adds a panoramic sunroof, 18-inch dark wheels, red-painted brake calipers, and an 8.8-inch info-tainment display that is com-patible with Apple CarPlay. Both Giulia and Super trims are equipped with an all-aluminium 200-horsepower 2.0-litre tur-bocharged four-cylinder en-gine, allowing them to acceler-ate from zero to 100kph in just 6.6 seconds.

The Veloce variant sports an all-aluminium, 2.0-litre, di-rect-injection turbo engine that produces 280hp and 400 Nm of

torque, allowing the sports se-dan to go from zero to 100kph in a zippy 5.2 seconds.

The top-of-the-line Quadri-foglio grade features more lux-ury touches including two-tone sport leather seats and steering wheel with red stitching, car-bon-fi bre interior roof, adaptive suspension, and active cruise control, along with unique 19-inch wheels. The Quadrifoglio trim takes things to a whole new level with its 510hp 2.9-litre V6 engine that is equipped with twin turbochargers. It can accel-erate from zero to 100kph in just 3.9 seconds.

There’s also Alfa Romeo’s fi rst-ever SUV – the Stelvio. Combining stylish design with handcrafted fi nishes, and out-

standing off -road capabilities, the all-new Stelvio remains a family-friendly SUV. Step in-side it, and you will be greeted by soft padded surfaces, pre-mium leather, aluminium, and real wood.

There are two trim levels available: the base Stelvio and the high-performance Stelvio Quadrifoglio. Under the hood of the standard variant, there is a four-cylinder, 2.0-litre tur-bocharged engine, chugging out 280hp and 400 Nm of torque.

The top-of-the-line Stelvio Quadrifoglio sports a V6, bi-turbo 2.9-litre engine delivering 510hp, allowing it to go from zero to 100kph in just 3.8 seconds, before maxing out at 283kph. Thanks to its elegant, sporty style,

thrilling handling and supreme performance, Alfa Romeo’s fi rst SUV has received international recognition and awards such as, the ‘Sport SUV of the Year’ and ‘Best Compact Premium SUV’ by What Car? Magazine. Better still, the Stelvio Quadrifoglio has re-tained its crown as “world’s fast-est SUV around the circuit,” with a 7.51-second blast around the Nurburgring.

Among the unique mod-els also included in this off er is the all-new Giulietta. The hot hatchback’s range includes Su-per and Veloce trims. Aside from the Super variant that benefi ts from a 170hp, 1.4-litre turbo-charged four-cylinder engine, the sportier Giulietta Veloce trim adds a panoramic sunroof,

red-painted brake calipers, car-bon-fi bre fi nishing interior in-serts, and 17-inch dark wheels, among other key features.

The real treasure of the Veloce trim level is under the hood where a turbocharged four-cylinder, 1.75-litre engine chugs out 240hp and 340 Newton meters of torque. This engine is capable of propel-ling the hot hatchback from zero to 100kph in just 6 seconds.

Charly Dagher, general man-ager, Alfardan Sports Mo-tors, said, “We are delighted to launch this new summer cam-paign that will allow our clients to experience the highest levels of craftsmanship and thrilling performance that Alfa Romeo is renowned for. This is an excel-lent opportunity to choose a car

from our award-wining model range – vehicles that evoke sheer driving pleasure, effi ciency, and performance.”

All Alfa Romeo models are available at the brand’s show-room located in The Pearl-Qatar’s Medina Centrale area. Designed in line with Alfardan Sports Motors’ retail concept and customer service standards, the new showroom’s working hours are from Saturday-Thurs-day, 10am-10pm. Clients can also call 44209169.

Dedicated to off ering top quality customer service, Al-fardan Sports Motors has also opened a new service centre for Alfa Romeo located on Al Khor Coastal Road, a 20-minute drive from downtown Doha.

WWRC marks World Breastfeeding Week with community programmesWomen’s Wellness

and Research Center (WWRC), part of

Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC), in recognition of World Breastfeeding Week, is holding awareness and advocacy events until August 7. The events will be held between 10am and 1pm, at WWRC until August 7 and between 4pm and 9pm today at Qatar National Library.

The WWRC runs a daily breastfeeding clinic from 9am-11.30am in the Outpatient De-partment. Every year during World Breastfeeding Week, HMC joins the global commu-nity to highlight the signifi cant

health benefi ts of breastfeeding. This year, the week is being held under the theme ‘Empower Par-ents. Enable Breastfeeding.’

Increasing the number of babies being optimally breast-fed could prevent hundreds of thousands of child and maternal deaths around the world each year, according to World Health Organisation (WHO).

Dr Amal Abu Bakr, lead lacta-tion consultant and chairperson of the Breastfeeding Committee at WWRC, stresses that breast milk provides protective im-munity against infections and chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease,

and childhood leukaemia.“Breast milk contains all the

nutrients that are needed for a child’s optimal growth and de-velopment. The cholesterol and fatty acids in breast milk are scientifi cally proven to promote strong immunity and higher in-telligence in children. The WHO states that more than 823,000 child and 20,000 maternal deaths could be avoided each year if we strictly implement op-timal breastfeeding, especially among babies up to six months of age. The WHO also recommends that babies should continue to be breastfed for up to two years of age with the addition of timely,

healthy, supplementary foods,” said Dr Abu Bakr.

The term optimal breastfeed-ing refers to the practice of ex-clusive breastfeeding (breast-milk with no other foods or liquids) for the fi rst six months of life, followed by breast milk and complementary foods from about six months of age on and continued breastfeeding for up to two years of age.

Dr Abu Bakr notes that sci-entifi c evidence has proven that breastfeeding is also benefi cial to a mother’s physical and emo-tional health. She says breast-feeding strengthens the bond between mother and child, aids

in postpartum recovery, reduces the risk of postpartum bleed-ing, anaemia, breast and ovar-ian cancer, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and osteoporosis dur-ing menopause. There is also less postpartum anxiety and depression among breastfeeding mothers compared with those who do not breastfeed.

“At HMC, we off er our moth-ers access to skilled practical help from our staff who have been trained to provide breastfeeding support and to help build moth-ers’ confi dence, improve their babies’ feeding technique, and prevent or resolve breastfeeding problems,” noted Dr Abu Bakr.

Breast milk provides protective immunity against infections and chronic diseases.

HEC Paris in Qatar and Elite Paper Recycling sign pactHEC Paris in Qatar has

signed an agreement with Elite Paper Recy-

cling ( EPR) for their paper waste collection.

This agreement with EPR re-fl ects HEC Paris’ commitment to align and strengthen its vi-sion to support Qatar National Vision 2030 in transforming the country into an advanced society capable of achieving sustainable development by 2030.

Elite Paper Recycling manu-factures kraft paper with paper and cardboard waste. In just about fi ve years of being in the business, the company strives to contribute positively to the nation’s sustainable economy by providing gainful learning and employment opportuni-ties, while meeting the chal-lenges of the ever-changing environment.

Dr Nils Plambeck, dean & CEO, HEC Paris in Qatar, said, “We are pleased to collaborate with Elite Paper Recycling to en-

Abdulla-Alsuwaidi Nils Plambeck

hance the sustainable paradigms in Qatar. Our fast depleting nat-ural resources are a great cause for concern and preserving them is one of the most critical needs for every single organisation.”

Abdalla al-Suwaidi, chair-man EPR stated, “Our main goal is to spread awareness within our community and especially

among the young generation, and educate the youth on the importance of recycling and environmental protection and sustainability. EPR has launched mega public awareness projects such as ‘The Eco Dome’ and the ‘Green Fleet’, all part of the over-all communication strategy and of course in line with Qatar Na-

tional Vision 2030.” In Qatar, HEC Paris runs an

International Executive MBA, a Specialised Master’s Degree in Strategic Business Unit Man-agement, executive short pro-grammes and certifi cates for managers as well as executives and custom programmes for companies.

Partial traffi c shift on Al Wakrah road

The Public Works Au-thority (Ashghal) has announced a partial

traffi c shift for six months from tomorrow on Al Wak-rah main road between Al Afj a roundabout (known as Al Ja-bal roundabout) and Woqod Petrol Station.

The shift on a 1.5km stretch, implemented in co-ordination with the General Directorate of Traffi c, is to allow the reconstruction of Al Wakrah main road. Ash-ghal will install road signs to advise motorists of the traffi c shift. Ashghal has requested all road users to abide by the speed limits and follow the road signs to en-sure safety.

Eclipse Car Protection and Trading opens showroomEclipse Car Protection and

Trading, a Qatar-based car services company

that specialises in introduc-ing the latest innovative prod-ucts in window tinting, vehicle wrapping and paint protection fi lms, has opened its new show-room at the Doha Petrol Station premises, C-Ring Road.

Waleed Anbar Waleed inau-gurated the new showroom by cutting a ribbon in the presence of Eclipse chief executive of-fi cer George Sebastian, Middle East & North Africa supplier Satbir Singh Anand and Guru-preet Singh Anand, and other well-wishers.

Eclipse is introducing STC’s

(Solar Technologies Canada) product line-up in window tint-ing, called ‘Skin and Eye Care’ range, which is applicable in vast areas like automotive, ma-rine, schools, commercial & residential buildings, malls, and restaurants.

STC Skin & Eye Care fi lm will protect eyes and skin from both blue light and ultra violet rays by 99.9%. This high performance product will be sold in Qatar for the fi rst time. The skin protec-tion range has very high heat rejection, and protects from UV rays up to 400 nanometres. It has multiple layers protection within itself and comes from light to dark shades.

As an introductory off er, the fi rst 99 customers can avail of-fer prices starting from QR499 for saloon cars and QR799 for SUV across a wide range of services(terms and conditions apply). The STC brand also features a wide range of prod-ucts tailored to suit diff erent customer requirements.

Sebastian has vast experience in the automotive industry since 1990. The group of companies in Qatar includes Xpress Car Serv-ices, Semco Cars & Equipments, Fast Track Car Care Centre and GEO Auto Parts. The second branch of Eclipse is expected on Salwa Road soon, followed by a third one in the Industrial Area.The opening of the new showroom of Eclipse Car Protection and Trading.

Qatar has welcomed the signing of an agreement on the constitutional declaration by Sudan’s Military Transitional Council and the Forces of Freedom and Change.In a statement yesterday, the Foreign Ministry, expressed Qatar’s thanks to the African

Union in “bridging the gap” between the Sudanese parties, and on its pivotal role in reaching agreement.The statement expressed Qatar’s hope that the declaration will achieve the aspirations of the Sudanese people, and its just demands for

freedom, peace and justice, and to ensure real representation in the political process for all its spectrums without exclusion.The Foreign Ministry stressed Qatar’s position, which supports the unity, stability and sovereignty of Sudan. (QNA) Page 4

Qatar welcomes signing of Sudanese pact

REGION/ARAB WORLD

Gulf Times Monday, August 5, 20194

Iran seizes Iraqi tanker smuggling fuel in Gulf: TVReuters Tehran

Iranian Revolutionary Guards yester-day seized an Iraqi oil tanker in the Gulf which they said was smuggling fuel and

detained seven crewmen, Iran’s state media reported, in a show of power amid height-ened tension with the West.

The vessel was intercepted near Iran’s Far-si Island in the Gulf, Iran’s semi-offi cial Fars news agency said.

The elite Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has a navy base on Farsi Island which is located north of the Strait of Hor-muz.

“The IRGC’s naval forces have seized a foreign oil tanker in the Persian Gulf that was smuggling fuel for some Arab countries,” the Guards commander Ramezan Zirahi told state TV.

The state news agency IRNA, quoting the Guards, said it was an Iraqi ship that was seized on Wednesday night in the Gulf.

Zirahi said it was carrying 700,000 litres of fuel, without elaborating on the nationali-ties of the detained crewmen.

“The boats of the IRGC navy were patrol-ling the area to control traffi c and detect il-licit trade when they seized the tanker,” Fars quoted Zirahi as saying, adding that the sei-zure was in coordination with Iran’s judicial authorities.

Iran, which has some of the world’s cheapest fuel prices due to heavy state sub-sidies and the fall of its currency, has been fi ghting rampant fuel smuggling by land to neighbouring countries and by sea to Gulf Arab states.

“The tanker was transferred to the Bush-ehr port, where its fuel was handed over to the authorities,” Zirahi told TV.

A spokesman for the US Navy’s Bahrain-based Fifth Fleet said they had no informa-tion to confi rm the media reports.

Iran’s English-language Press TV aired a video that it said “shows the process through

which the IRGC have halted the ship and taken it into custody”.

“The ship was seized in Iranian territo-rial waters and had been transporting diesel fuel,” it added.

Another oil tanker, the Panama-fl agged MT Riah, was captured by the elite force last month for allegedly smuggling fuel.

Tensions have risen between Iran and the West since last year when the United States pulled out of an international agreement which curbed the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programme in return for an easing of eco-nomic sanctions on Iran.

Fuelling fears of a Middle East war with global repercussions, the Guards seized Brit-ish tanker Stena Impero near the Strait of Hormuz in July for alleged marine violations, two weeks after British forces captured an Iranian oil tanker near Gibraltar accused of violating sanctions on Syria.

Angered by intensifi ed US sanctions de-signed to strangle its vital oil trade and the failure of Britain and European parties to the agreement to salvage the pact, Tehran has decreased its commitments to the nuclear deal.

Iran also has threatened to block all ex-ports through the Strait, if countries heed US calls to stop buying Iranian oil.

One-fi fth of global oil consumption pass-es through the Strait from Middle East crude producers to major markets.

“The Persian Gulf is like a tinderbox and explosion of a fi recracker can lead to a huge disaster,” the semi-offi cial Mehr news agen-cy yesterday quoted Guards commander Brigadier General Ahmadreza Pourdastan as saying. “All countries which have interests in the region absolutely are not willing to see a new regional crisis.”

Britain had said on July 25 it had started sending a warship to accompany all British-fl agged vessels through the Strait.

Iran has repeatedly said it will not allow any disturbance in shipping in the key oil transport waterway, claiming responsibility for the security of the Strait.

Sudan generals, protesters sign deal on civilian ruleAFPKhartoum

Sudan’s ruling generals and protest leaders yesterday signed a hard-won constitu-

tional declaration, paving the way for a transition to civilian rule after more than seven months of demon-strations and violence.

Under the agreement, signed at a ceremony in the capital Khartoum, a joint civilian-military ruling body will oversee the formation of a civilian government and parliament to govern for a three-year transition period.

The declaration was the result of fraught negotiations between the leaders of mass protests, which erupted last December against the three-decade rule of president Omar al-Bashir, and the generals who ousted him in April.

It builds on a July 17 power-shar-ing deal between the two sides.

Protest movement leader Ahmed Rabie and the deputy head of the rul-ing military council General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo signed the declaration at a ceremony attended by African Union and Ethiopian mediators.

“We turned a tough page of Su-dan’s history by signing this agree-ment,” Daglo, who fl ashed a victory sign after making a short speech, told reporters.

The signing was met by applause in the hall as representatives from both sides shook hands.

Members of the protest umbrella group, the Alliance for Freedom and Change, broke into tears as they ex-changed hugs.

Crowds of jubilant Sudanese gath-ered outside the hall, chanting “blood for blood, our government is civilian” and “revolution, revolution”.

In the Bahari district of north Khartoum, dozens were chant-ing “this country is ours and the government is civilian” as drivers honked their horns in celebration.

In the city of Omdurman, hun-dreds were clapping, chanting and dancing to drum beats.

A formal signing with foreign dig-nitaries in attendance is to take place on August 17, another protest leader, Monzer Abu al-Maali, told AFP.

On the same day, Bashir is due to go on trial on corruption charges.

The next day, the generals and protest leaders are to announce the composition of the new transitional civilian-majority ruling council, Abu al-Maali said.

“The prime minister will be named on August 20 and cabinet members on August 28,” he said, adding that the sovereign council and cabinet would meet for the fi rst time on September 1.

The talks had been repeatedly in-

terrupted by deadly violence against demonstrators who have kept up rallies to press for civilian rule.

Talks were suspended for weeks after men in military uniform broke up a long-running protest camp outside army headquarters in Khar-toum on June 3, killing at least 127 people, according to doctors close to the protest movement.

The movement has laid most of the blame on the powerful Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group, commanded by Daglo.

Protest leaders say the accord calls for an investigation into protest-related violence which, according to protest-linked doctors, has cost more than 250 lives since December.

Under yesterday’s deal, RSF para-militaries are to be integrated into

the army’s chain of command.Omar Hussein, a protester waving

the Sudanese fl ag outside the nego-tiations hall, was overjoyed by the signing.

“Now we can tell the martyrs that their blood was not wasted,” he said.

Ibtisam al-Sanhouri, a legal af-fairs negotiator for the protest movement, said the constitutional declaration clears the way for a par-liamentary system with a civilian prime minister.

She said the protest movement would have 201 of 300 seats in par-liament and the premier, to be con-fi rmed by the new sovereign council.

The document touches on a peace deal agreed with three armed groups last month in Addis Ababa, protest leader Babiker Faisal said.

Sudanese demonstrators celebrate in Khartoum yesterday.

Egypt displays restoration of Tutankhamun gilded coffi nAFP Cairo

Egypt yesterday displayed the gilded coffi n of Tut-ankhamun, under restoration for the fi rst time since the boy king’s tomb was discovered in 1922. The resto-

ration process began in mid-July after the three-tiered coffi n was transferred to the new Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo from the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, southern Egypt.

“We are showing you a unique historical artefact, not just for Egypt but for the world,” Antiquities Minister Khaled el-Enany told a press conference at the new mu-seum, which overlooks the famed Giza Pyramids.

The golden coffi n of the boy king will be displayed along with other Tutankhamun artefacts towards the end of next year when Egypt’s new mega-museum is opened to the pub-lic. The restoration is expected to take around eight months.

The outer gilded wood coffi n stands at 2.23m and is deco-rated with a depiction of the boy king holding the pharaonic symbols, the fl ail and crook, according to the ministry. In the last century, the coffi n has “developed cracks in its gild-ed layers of plaster, especially those of the lid and base”.

Famed British archaeologist Howard Carter discovered the tomb of the 18th dynasty king in Luxor in 1922.

Yesterday’s announcement comes after the controversy the Pharoah courted last month when a 3,000-year-old Tutankhamun artefact was sold in London for $6mn. Fu-rious Egyptian offi cials condemned the sale and asked the international police agency Interpol to trace the artefact which it deems looted.

An archaeologist restores the throne of King Tutankhamun at the conservation centre in the Grand Egyptian Museum.

WFP, Houthis agree deal that could lift partial aid suspension

The World Food Programme (WFP) and Yemen’s Houthi movement, which controls the capital Sanaa, have said they had reached a deal that could

lift the UN agency’s partial suspension of aid which has aff ected around 850,000 people.

The UN agency halted some aid in Sanaa on June 20 out of concern that food was being diverted from vulnerable people, but said it would maintain nutrition programmes for malnourished children, pregnant and nursing mothers.

The warring parties in Yemen’s confl ict have both used access to aid and food as a political tool, exacerbating what the United Nations has called the world’s worst humani-tarian crisis. Of Yemen’s 30mn people, three-quarters need humanitarian assistance.

A Houthi offi cial tweeted late on Saturday that the group, which ousted the internationally recognised gov-ernment from power in Sanaa in late 2014, had inked a deal with the WFP. “Cash distribution will soon begin, God willing, in accordance with the mechanism,” said Mohamed Ali al-Houthi, head of the Houthis’ Supreme Revolutionary Committee.

Cash transfers to those in need so they can buy goods is a common method of aid distribution.

AFRICA5Gulf Times

Monday, August 5, 2019

African nations, Western partners strive to combat IED threatBy Maggie Fick, Reuters Nairobi

A US-trained Kenyan bomb dis-posal technician stood in a fi eld showing colleagues from more

than 20 countries how to collect evi-dence after the detonation of a road-side explosive.

Security experts who met in the Kenyan capital Nairobi last week say African nations must do more of such intelligence-sharing to counter weap-ons widely considered the greatest threat to their security forces: impro-vised explosive devices (IEDs).

Popularised by insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, homemade bombs were deployed by militants in nine African countries last year and killed about 3,600 people, according to US Defense Department fi gures.

Some groups now use the weapons in complex attacks targeting civilians, including in January when a suicide bomber and gunmen from Somalia-based Shebaab stormed an offi ce and hotel complex in Nairobi, killing 21 people.

African officials at this week’s meeting, organised by the US mili-tary, acknowledged IEDs pose a ma-jor challenge to their forces, in part because the devices are constantly evolving as are the militant groups who use them.

“The enemy adapts faster than we react,” said a Western offi cial at the conference who asked not to be iden-tifi ed.

Training for Africa’s police and mili-tary forces has typically focused on ways to avoid and defuse IEDs.

Now governments are looking to the next step: attacking networks that de-ploy them.

This requires new skills, including analysing remnants of a bomb to glean information about who made it and how it works.

But acquiring that intelligence is only half the battle, US military and FBI experts told the conference.

Ensuring it is disseminated throughout national security agencies and shared with counterparts in other countries is the other half.

Groups such as Shebaab and Niger-ia-based Boko Haram launch attacks in

multiple countries, they reminded the conference.

“Unless intelligence is being shared at the appropriate levels and in a timely way, we’ll never get ahead of the curve in dismantling these networks,” said Matt Bryden, director of Sahan Re-search, a Nairobi-based think tank.

The amount of cooperation between security agencies varies in Africa, said Michael Solis, who helps lead coun-ter-IED programmes at the US Africa Command.

“It is still a very nascent concept to share information,” he added.

“We had the same evolution in the US...We went through it decades ago, and now we have an eff ective multi-agency security sector.”

Kenya, which is improving its bomb squad with training and support from the United States and other Western nations, is further ahead than most, US experts said.

“It’s essential for the military and the police to work together, so that we can win the battle against the common enemy,” said Patrick Ogina, senior su-perintendent of the Kenyan police and deputy head of its bomb disposal unit.

High-level improvised explosive device specialists from Africa and Western partners attend a demonstration of a post-blast IED investigation during a seminar at the Humanitarian and Peace Support School at Embakasi in Nairobi.

Nigerian leader detained over ‘revolution’ callAFPLagos

A former Nigerian presidential candidate and director of an in-fl uential online news site criti-

cal of the government has been arrest-ed for calling for “revolution”, security services said yesterday.

Omoyele Sowore, one of the op-position candidates in February’s presidential election, had on Friday called on Twitter for a march today in Abuja with a reference to “revo-lution”.

Later Sowore, who runs the Sahara Reporters news site, said the DSS se-

curity services were at his home, but made no further comment.

DSS spokesman Peter Afunaya yes-terday confi rmed the former candidate had been detained and was in custody.

“We cannot allow any person or group to foment chaos or fan the em-bers of revolution,” he said yesterday.

“If someone is calling for revolution in Nigeria, it means a revolt...insur-gency. He has crossed the line, threat-ened public safety.”

Sowore is a fi erce opponent of Presi-dent Muhammadu Buhari, who won another four-year term in February and faces challenges including an Is-lamist insurgency, a fragile economy and rife corruption.

Sowore’s news website has often highlighted alleged graft in the govern-ment.

In his Friday tweet he wrote: “All that is needed for a #Revolution is for the oppressed to choose a date they de-sire for liberty, not subjected to the ap-proval of the oppressor. #Revolution-Now #DaysofRage #August5”.

He gave no further details of what was planned for that date.

Sowore, of the African Action Con-gress party, had joined other the new opposition candidates such as Kings-ley Moghalu, a former central bank deputy governor, and Fela Durotoye, a motivational speaker, in the run for the presidency.

2 South Africans killed in Tanzania plane crash

ReutersDar es Salaam

A light plane crashed on Saturday in western Tanzania, killing two South Africans who had been

involved in last month’s successful at-tempt to fl y a home-built aircraft from Cape Town to Cairo, offi cials said.

The crashed Sling plane, which en-tered Tanzanian airspace from Uganda en route to Malawi, made a distress signal about engine failure before dis-appearing from radar, according to the Tanzania Civil Aviation Authority (TCAA).

“The pilot and passenger, both South African citizens, were killed in the plane crash that occurred shortly after take off from Tabora airport at around 7:30am,” Sikonge district commissioner Peres Magiri told ITV television station late on Saturday.

The plane was destroyed by fi re after the crash and only the engine and some other parts were recovered.

It was owned by a South African or-ganisation known as U-Dream Global.

On the group’s Facebook account, it said the Tanzanian accident involved the fl ight support aircraft for the Cape to Cairo Challenge and that project

directors, Des Werner and Werner Froneman lost their lives.

No one else was involved in the ac-cident, U-Dream Global said.

South Africa’s Department of In-ternational Relations and Cooperation said it has activated its consular serv-ices to support aff ected families.

U-Dream Global, made interna-tional headlines in June when a group of students successfully built a four-seater Sling aircraft and then fl ew it from Cape Town to Cairo in July.

On its website, U-Dream Global is described as a not-for-profi t organisa-tion founded by teen pilot and motiva-tional speaker Megan Werner in 2018.

Central Africa peace deal still fragile: UNAFPBangui

The peace deal between the Cen-tral African Republic govern-ment and rebel groups remains

fragile, nearly six months after it was signed, UN experts said in a new report released over the weekend.

Members of the armed groups who signed the deal have violated interna-tional humanitarian law nearly every day since it was signed, said the ex-perts.

There was little or no sign the rebel fi ghters had changed their ways — or that their leaders had punished anyone violating the peace deal, the report said.

MINUSCA, the UN peacekeeping mission in the country, had recorded

between 10 and 70 violations of the peace deal, every week, they added.

The deal, between the government and 14 armed groups, was signed on February 6 in the Sudanese capital Khartoum.

The armed groups, in particular the mainly Muslim rebel alliance called the Seleka, had maintained their positions and surrendered none of their territory since, the report added.

They had even tightened their grip on their zones of control and had bought arms.

The report was sceptical, too, of the mixed units of government forces and rebel fi ghters due to be deployed under the terms of the deal.

The leaders of the former Seleka group saw this deployment as a way of making offi cial the positioning of their

fi ghters along the key transport routes and other key areas, as they insisted on leading the units, the report noted.

Nevertheless, none of the previous fi ve deals signed since the country’s crisis started at the end of 2012 had generated as much commitment from national and international participants, they said.

One of the world’s poorest and most unstable nations, CAR has suff ered several violent crises since 2003 when former president Francois Bozize seized power in a coup.

The country spiralled into bloodshed after Bozize was overthrown in 2013 by the Seleka alliance.

Much of its territory fell to armed groups trying to control gold, diamond and oil deposits, hampering attempts to build peace and national reconciliation.

Giraff es walk in the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya.

Walking tall!

AMERICAS

Gulf Times Monday, August 5, 20196

US mourns mass shooting victimsFrom Page 1

Yesterday, he said federal and local authorities were working together on both attacks.

Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney rebut-ted the Democrats’ allegations and attributed the shootings to “sick” individuals.

“There’s no benefi t here in try-ing to make this a political issue, this is a social issue and we need to address it as that,” he said on ABC’s This Week.

It was a personal issue for Beto O’Rourke, the former congress-man who returned to El Paso af-ter the attack in his hometown. Asked on CNN if he believed Trump was a white nationalist, he responded, “Yes, I do.”

“Let’s be very clear about what is causing this and who the president is,” O’Rourke said. “He is an open avowed racist and is encouraging more racism in this country.”

US Senator Bernie Sanders said later on CNN that he agreed that Trump was a white nationalist.

“It gives me no pleasure to say this but I think all of the evidence out there suggests that we have a president who is a racist, who is a xenophobe who appeals, and is trying to appeal, to white nation-alism,” Sanders said on CNN.

A hallmark of Trump’s presi-dency has been his determina-tion to curb illegal immigration. Trump has drawn criticism for comments disparaging Mexican

immigrants and referring to the fl ood of migrants trying to enter through the US southern border as an “invasion”.

In recent weeks, critics also accused Trump of racism after his attacks on members of Con-gress who are members of racial or ethnic minorities. Trump has denied he is a racist.

Trump has not made a public

statement on the shootings other than his Twitter posts, which also expressed sympathy for the victims.

The White House cannot shirk its responsibility in shaping pub-lic discourse, said Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indi-ana. “There’s no question that white nationalism is condoned at the highest levels of our govern-

ment,” he told Fox News Sunday.Senator Kamala Harris and Ju-

lian Castro accused Trump of us-ing the powerful microphone of the White House to sow division.

“He’s spoken about immi-grants as being invaders. He’s given licence for this toxic brew of white supremacy to fester more and more in this country, and we’re seeing the results of

that,” Castro, the former Demo-cratic mayor of San Antonio, said on ABC.

While authorities were still investigating the motive of the El Paso shooter, Texas Gover-nor Greg Abbott said the ram-page appeared to be a hate crime. Police Chief Greg Allen said a “manifesto” believed to be from the suspect indicated “there is a

potential nexus to a hate crime”.The statement called the Wal-

mart attack “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas”. The manifesto also expressed sup-port for the gunman who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March.

The shooting renewed attention to domestic terrorism. FBI Direc-tor Christopher Wray told a Sen-ate hearing in July the majority of the domestic terrorism the FBI has investigated were “motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence”.

Former Vice President Joe Bi-den launched his presidential campaign with a reminder of Trump’s response to the deadly 2017 attack at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, when he said there were “fi ne people” on both sides.

Biden refrained from attacks on Trump yesterday, instead calling for action to end “our gun violence epidemic”.

Pope Francis condemned the spate of attacks on “defenseless people” in the United States, in-cluding a rampage last Sunday in which a gunman killed three people and wounded about a dozen at a garlic festival in Gilroy, California.

El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, together with the neighbouring city of Las Cruces, New Mexico, form a metropolitan border area of some 2.5mn residents con-stituting the largest bilingual,

binational population in North America.

Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said three Mexican nationals were among the 20 people killed in the shoot-ing, and nine others were among 26 who were wounded.

The carnage ranked as the eighth-deadliest mass shoot-ing in modern US history, after a 1984 shooting in San Ysidro, Cal-ifornia, in which 21 people died.

Despite several high-profi le mass shootings in recent years, gun control has proven to be an intractable debate within the US Congress, as lawmakers have failed to advance any signifi cant policy changes to combat them.

Republicans and some mod-erate Democrats have resisted placing additional restrictions on gun ownership, and eff orts to improve mental health services or establish new ways to identify potential shooters before they act have not gained traction.

Nonetheless, Democrats re-sponded to the pair of shootings this weekend with renewed calls for Washington to take action.

The Senate’s leading Demo-crat, Chuck Schumer, called on Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to hold an emergency session to debate gun control legislation, after law-makers left Washington just a few days ago for a 5-week recess. McConnell’s offi ce did not im-mediately respond to a request for comment.

A CCTV image obtained by KTSM 9 news channel of the gunman, identified as 21-year-old Patrick Crusius, as he enters the Cielo Vista Walmart store in El Paso on Saturday.

Walmart shooting is domestic terror caseUS authorities investigating what

drove a young gunman from the

Dallas area to kill 20 people at a

Walmart store hundreds of miles

away in the border city of El Paso

said yesterday they are treating it

as a case of domestic terrorism.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott

said Saturday’s rampage ap-

peared to be a hate crime, and

police cited a manifesto they

attributed to the suspect as

evidence that the bloodshed was

racially motivated.

A state prosecutor said they

will seek the death penalty for

the suspect, Patrick Crusius, 21, of

Allen, Texas.

The US attorney for the west-

ern district of Texas, John Bash,

said federal authorities were

treating the massacre as a case of

domestic terrorism.

“And we’re going to do what

we do to terrorists in this country,

which is to deliver swift and cer-

tain justice,” Bash told reporters

at a news conference yesterday.

The shooting immediately

reverberated on the US presiden-

tial campaign trail, with several

Democratic candidates denounc-

ing the rise of gun violence and

repeating calls for tighter gun

control measures.

At least two candidates, Mayor

Pete Buttigieg of South Bend,

Indiana, and El Paso native Beto

O’Rourke, a former congressman,

drew connections to a resur-

gence in white nationalism and

xenophobic politics in the United

States.

“America is under attack from

homegrown white nationalist

terrorism,” Buttigieg said at a

candidate forum in Las Vegas.

On Twitter, US President Don-

ald Trump branded the shooting

“an act of cowardice,” adding, “I

know that I stand with everyone

in this country to condemn

today’s hateful act. There are no

reasons or excuses that will ever

justify killing innocent people.”

Police said the suspect opened

fire with a rifle on shoppers, many

of them bargain-hunting for back-

to-school supplies, then surren-

dered to off icers who confronted

him outside the store.

El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen

said the suspect was co-operating

with investigators.

“He basically didn’t hold

anything back,” Allen said at

yesterday’s news conference, but

declined to elaborate.

The massacre came just six

days after the last major outbreak

of US gun violence in a public

place — a food festival in Califor-

nia where a teenager killed three

people with an assault rifle and

injured a dozen others before tak-

ing his own life in a hail of police

gunfire.

The Texas killings were

followed just 13 hours later by

another mass shooting in Dayton,

Ohio, where a gunman in body

armour killed nine people in less

than a minute and wounded 27

others in the city’s downtown

historic district before he was

shot dead by police.

Crusius comes from Allen, Texas,

a Dallas suburb some 1,046km

east of El Paso, which lies along the

Rio Grande across the US-Mexico

border from Ciudad Juarez.

Several local politicians said

the gunman was an outsider, sug-

gesting he had traveled hundreds

of miles from the Dallas area to

commit mass murder.

But Gomez declined to say how

long the suspect might have been

in El Paso before the shooting.

Authorities did not off er a

precise motive, but said they were

examining a manifesto from the

suspect that Allen said indicated

“there is a potential nexus to a

hate crime.”

A four-page statement posted

on an online message board often

used by extremists, and believed

to have been written by the sus-

pect, called the Walmart attack “a

response to the Hispanic invasion

of Texas.”

“We are going to aggres-

sively prosecute it both as capital

murder but also as a hate crime,

which is exactly what it appears

to be,” Texas Governor Abbott

told reporters late on Saturday.

El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, to-

gether with the neighbouring city

of Las Cruces, New Mexico, form a

metropolitan border area of some

2.5mn residents constituting

the largest bilingual, bi-national

population in North America.

The carnage ranked as the

eighth-deadliest mass shooting

in modern US history, after a 1984

shooting in San Ysidro, California,

that claimed 21 lives.

Investigators were still deter-

mining the sequence of events.

But video clips from the scene

showed victims lying on the

ground inside and outside the

store.

One shopper told Reuters

the gunshots sounded like they

began outside the building and

then moved inside.

El Paso Mayor Dee Margo said

police responded to the shooting

within six minutes.

Local television station KTSM-

TV published two photos it cited a

law enforcement source as saying

were security-camera images

of the suspect as he entered the

Walmart, wearing eyeglasses,

khaki trousers and a dark T-shirt,

and wielding an assault-style rifle.

He appeared to be wearing

headphones or ear protection.

Eyewitnesses described scenes

of pandemonium as shoppers fled

for their lives, including Kianna

Long who was at the Walmart

with her husband when they

heard gunfire.

The couple sprinted through

a stock room at the back of the

store before huddling with other

customers in a shipping area, she

recounted.

“People were panicking and

running,” Long said. “They were

running close to the floor, people

were dropping on the floor.”

Airport bans sale of plastic bottles

San Francisco International Airport is banning the sale of single-use plastic bottles and will require fl iers to buy refi llable bottles if they’re not already

carrying their own, US media reported over the week-end. The new rule comes into eff ect on August 20, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, and is part of a fi ve-year plan to lower landfi ll waste, net carbon emissions and net energy use to zero.

“We’re the fi rst airport that we’re aware of to imple-ment this change,” airport spokesman Doug Yakel told the newspaper. “We’re on the leading edge for the in-dustry, and we want to push the boundaries of sustain-ability initiatives,” he said.

The ban will apply to all restaurants, cafes and vend-ing machines, though not to planes using the airport. It exempts brands of fl avoured water. Filtered water is pro-vided for free at 100 “hydration stations,” where fl yers can top up glass or metal bottles. The airport describes itself as an “industry leader” in sustainability, installing solar panels and instructing all tenants to use fully com-postable food ware including straws and utensils.

The city of San Francisco banned the sale of plastic water bottles on city-owned property back in 2014, but allowed delays and granted certain exemptions.

Global plastic production has grown rapidly, and is currently at more than 400mn tons per year. Single-use items represent about 70% of the plastic waste lit-tering the marine environment.

Each year, a million birds and more than 100,000 marine mammals worldwide are injured or killed by be-coming entangled in plastic or ingesting it through the food chain.

Canada resident home after Iran jail escape

AFPOttawa

An Iranian serving a life sen-tence on a conviction of de-signing an adult website has

fl ed the country while on short-term release from prison and has arrived in Canada, the foreign min-istry and his family said yesterday.

“Canada welcomes the news that Saeed Malekpour has been re-united with his family in Canada,” a foreign ministry spokesman said in a statement received by AFP.

“We have advocated for Mr Male-kpour’s release and are pleased that he is now in Canada,” the spokes-man said, without elaborating due to privacy considerations.

Iranian authorities on Saturday confi rmed state television reports that Malekpour, who is also a per-manent resident of Canada, had left the Islamic republic.

“This individual was barred from leaving the country and has appar-

ently left...via unoffi cial channels and has not returned,” said judi-ciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaili.

“This individual was sentenced to life in jail and had served more than 11 years of his sentence,” Es-maili said, quoted by the judiciary’s offi cial news agency, Mizan Online.

He said Malekpour was given a three-day furlough on July 20 and by the end of it did not turn himself in to the prison.

His sister posted a video on Twitter confi rming he had re-turned to Canada.

“My brother Saeed Malekpour has just arrived to Canada! The nightmare is fi nally over!” Maryam Malekpour said.

“Thank you Canada for your leadership. And thank you to every single person who supported us throughout this time. Together we prevailed,” she added.

Canadian media said he had landed in Vancouver on Friday.

Payam Akhavan, a professor at

McGill University in Montreal who supported Malekpour, told CBC TV that his family in Iran and his lawyer knew nothing about the es-cape.

Citing Akhavan, CBC said Iran released Malekpour under “intense pressure” and that he escaped through a third country which was not identifi ed.

“It was far from certain that the plan to bring him to Canada would succeed. So we are all very relieved,” Akhavan said in a phone interview with CBC. “It was dan-gerous. Really, until he set foot in Canada we were not sure that everything would go according to plan.”

Malekpour was arrested in De-cember 2008 in Iran when he re-turned to his native land to visit his dying father.

He was accused of operating an adult website.

He was initially sentenced to death, but that was commuted to life in prison in August 2013.

Back to the wild: how ‘ungardening’ took root in AmericaBy Issam Ahmed and Ariela Navarro, AFPWashington

Retired union organiser Anna Burger lives by a busy road just a minute’s walk from a metro station in the US

capital Washington, but every morning she wakes up to a birdsong symphony.

Butterfl ies, squirrels and even the oc-casional deer also come to visit the tree-covered property that she has cultivated with a focus on native species that pro-vide nesting space and nourishment for the local wildlife.

Well-manicured grass lawns have long been associated with the American Dream, but a growing “rewilding” move-ment now seeks to reclaim yard space for nature.

“We knew that putting chemicals on grass to try to keep it green seemed to be a futile process that wasn’t good for kids playing or for the environment,” Burger told AFP.

She and her husband bought the house in 1990 and “we’ve tried to make it friendly, making sure that we have water sources, making sure that there are food sources so these trees aren’t the most colourful but have great berries.”

The couple’s home is surrounded by several houses whose occupants take a more traditional approach toward their green space, but a stroll through the leafy Takoma Park neighbourhood reveals many more where “ungardening” has taken root.

Precise defi nitions of what this means vary, but the concept of meddling less and celebrating nature more was notably popularised in 1993 book Noah’s Garden by Sara Stein.

A few blocks away from Burger’s house, Jim Nichols, a nurse consultant and mas-sage therapist, shows off the ‘Certifi ed Wildlife Habitat’ sign he acquired from a local non-profi t group after meeting

requirements like feeding, nesting space and water supply.

Nichols also eschews the use of pes-ticides in his yard, explaining: “We have a lot of insects and I try to work with the insects,” adding that he is particularly proud of the honey bees that come to wa-ter.

“It’s my energy space. It’s where I get energy and feed off the energy from my garden,” he added.

Irving and Gail, retired public school teachers in their seventies from the same neighbourhood, have a yard space fi lled with forest-like undergrowth and dozens of trees, attracting cardinals, blue jays and robins, but also plenty of mosquitoes.

“People will come up and either love it or they think it’s out of control,” laughed Gail, declining to give her last name.

That tension speaks to the confl icting views that have emerged about rewild-ing eff orts, said Chris Swan, an ecologist at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

On the one hand is an opposition to “this American tradition of mowing a garden and having a lawn,” in favour of letting nature take its course which in turn increases biodiversity of plants and animals, he said.

But people think that often “looks messy, it looks unkempt.”

“I don’t think people mind having

something that looks like...a wild place or prairie, or a meadow but they don’t like to see too tall. Anything over three feet starts to make people uncomfortable,” said Swan.

Looking beyond relatively affl uent suburbs, Swan argues that rewilding ef-forts can be even more transformative in the inner cities.

From 2014-18, he oversaw an ambi-tious experiment in the city of Baltimore, about 48km northeast of Washington, where decades of population decline have left around 17,000 vacant lots.

Most of these lots had very poor qual-ity soil and were overcome with debris, but Swan and his colleagues showed they could turn eyesores into urban meadows by planting native species like purple conefl owers and black-eyed Susans that prospered beyond their expectations.

Though the project eventually ended, Swan says he remains excited by its po-tential, and not just in Baltimore.

About 15% of the land in US cities is deemed vacant, an area roughly the size of Switzerland, according to the US De-partment of Agriculture Forest Service.

“The quality of the habitat changes, it attracts wildlife, the birds go crazy. And in the spring, we see an increase in pol-linators,” Swan says of the urban meadow project.

Another species that prospers: human beings.

A study in the Proceedings of the Na-tional Academy of Sciences last year found an almost 30% drop in gun violence around re-greened vacant lots in the city of Philadelphia.

Another 2018 paper in The Journal of the American Medical Association, that also looked at Philadelphia, found self-reported poor mental health dropped by more than 60% compared to a control group.

“And so being near those spaces actu-ally contributes to community well-be-ing,” concluded Swan.

Jim Nichols tends his “rewilded” garden in Takoma Park, Maryland.

ASIA7

Gulf Times Monday, August 5, 2019

Khmer Rouge’s chief ideologist dead at 93Nuon Chea, the chief

ideologist and ‘Brother Number Two’ of Cam-

bodia’s Khmer Rouge, whose brutal rule in the 1970s led to the deaths of some 2mn people, died yesterday at the age of 93, a court spokesman said.

A UN-backed court found Chea guilty of genocide and sen-tenced him to life in prison last year, almost four decades after the Maoist regime which over-saw Cambodia’s “Killing Fields” was overthrown.

Chea was among a small clique - led by ‘Brother Number One’, Pol Pot - of mostly French-educated com-munists who rose to lead a bloody revolution against a US-backed government after their country was engulfed by the Vietnam War.

The extremist ideology of the 1975-79 regime sought to turn Cambodia back to “year zero” in its quest for a peasant utopia.

Between 1.7 and 2.2mn peo-ple, almost a quarter of the Southeast Asian country’s population, died during its four

ReutersPhnom Penh

year rule, of starvation, torture, exhaustion or disease in labour camps or bludgeoned to death during mass executions.

“We can confi rm that defend-

ant Nuon Chea, 93, passed away this evening on August 4, 2019 at Khmer Soviet Friendship hospi-tal,” Neth Pheaktra, spokesman at the Extraordinary Cham-

bers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), said.

“Nuon Chea’s family has been informed.”

Of the Khmer Rouge’s lead-ers only former President Khieu Samphan and Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Comrade Duch, are serving life sentences after being convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity.

Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea were found guilty of crimes against humanity in the fi rst phase of the complex UN trial and sentenced to life in prison in 2014. A separate trial last year found Chea guilty of genocide.

Pol Pot died in 1998 at the age of 73.

Unlike others in Pol Pot’s in-ner circle, Nuon Chea did not study in Paris, and instead read law at Bangkok’s prestigious Thammasat University, where he became a member of the Thai Communist Party.

He was appointed Deputy Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, the name the Khmer Rouge used for Cam-bodia, in 1960, a position that put him in charge of party and state security and Phnom Penh’s notorious S-21 interrogation and torture centre at the capital’s

Tuol Sleng high school.Those carrying out the brutal

beatings at S-21 were instructed to “smash to bits” traitors and counter-revolutionaries.

Under the chaotic Khmer Rouge ideology, furthered by Chea, that could mean anyone from school teachers to children, to pregnant women and to “in-tellectuals” identifi ed as such if they were wearing spectacles.

On January 5, 1979, two days before the Vietnamese army overran Phnom Penh, Nuon Chea ordered S-21 head Duch to kill all remaining prisoners.

Court spokesman Pheaktra did not say how Chea died, but add-ed that he had been in hospital since early July.

Youk Chhang, director of Doc-umentation Center of Cambodia, an organisation which provided thousands of documents as evi-dence to the UN-backed court which prosecuted the Khmer Rouge, said Nuon Chea had es-caped his life sentence by dying.

“He was born just like the rest of us, but became driven by pow-er and prejudice against his own people,” Youk said.

“He can escape justice from the court of law but he can’t es-cape his punishment from God.”

Nuon Chea

Floods claim 108 lives in Bangladesh

Floods triggered by heavy seasonal rains and on-rush of water from hills

across the Indian borders have claimed at least 108 lives in Bangladesh, a disaster offi cial said yesterday.

The senior offi cial of the country’s National Disaster Response Coordination Cen-tre (NDRCC) told Xinhua news agency that “the fl oods caused the deaths of 108 people in 16 districts and widespread damage to habitation, crops, roads and highways across vast swathes of the country”.

Quoting the NDRCC’s daily fl ood situation report, the offi cial, on condition of anonymity, said most victims have drowned but some died in boat capsizals in the fl ood-hit areas.

Since the fi rst week of the

last month, he said at least 6mn people have been aff ect-ed by the fl oods while thou-sands of families were forced fl ee home.

Citing the report, he said fl ood situation is now improv-ing in most of the districts with water levels in many riv-ers receding.

Millions of people in Bang-ladesh, criss-crossed by more than 230 rivers, suff er from fl ooding as the low-lying country experiences seasonal fl oods every year during the June-September monsoon when rivers that feed into the Bay of Bengal burst their banks.

Bangladeshi Prime Min-ister Sheikh Hasina earlier urged offi cials to remain alert to tackle fl ood, saying some parts of the country have been fl ooded and the fl ood water would slowly come down to the mid areas of the country by the end of August.

IANSDhaka

More than 24,800 infected by dengue across Bangladesh

The number of dengue patients is increasing across Bangladesh

as 1,870 more new people were hospitalised with the infection in last 24 hours, according to the Emergen-cy Operations Centre and Control Room at the Di-rectorate General of Health Services.

On August 1, the highest number of dengue patients in a day was recorded at 1,712. The number of patients jumped again yesterday after a drop over the past two days.

Among the aff ected, 1,649 dengue cases were reported in Dhaka, the epicentre of the outbreak, and 817 elsewhere in the country.

The total number of den-gue patients admitted to dif-ferent hospitals was 15,650 in June. A total of 6,967 patients were added to the list within 72 hours in the beginning of August.

The new cases have put the number of people who have been diagnosed with dengue and hospitalised at 24,804 so far this year, according to the Directorate General of Health Services.

The directorate says the death toll in dengue this year has increased to 18, though the media already reported more than 50 fatal cases.

Syeda Akhter, wife of Ad-ditional Inspector General of Police Shahabuddin Qureshi, died from dengue at the age of 54 while undergoing treat-ment at the Square Hospital in Dhaka yesterday.

IANSDhaka

Nepal PM leaves for Singapore for health check-up

Nepal Prime Minister K P Sharma Oli yesterday left for Singapore for a health

check-up. The prime minister’s aides

said Oli, who underwent kidney transplant in 2007 in New Delhi, was going for a regular check-up at National University Hospital in Singapore.

Doctors attending the prime minister had referred him to the National University Hospital in Singapore. An ultrasound-guid-ed renal biopsy was conducted a few days ago on Oli to test the functioning of his kidneys.

There were traces of protein in his urine. He had heart palpita-tions and fl uctuating blood sugar.

He is going to Singapore not because he is sick, but because he has to undergo a routine check-up, said Kundan Aryal, PM Oli’s press adviser. He will undergo necessary medical tests, said Aryal.

After his kidney transplant, Oli had regularly undergone rou-tine health check-ups in diff er-ent countries, including India.

Oli had undergone treatment at the Singapore-based hospi-tal where he was treated for an infectious swelling in his right hand in 2014.

PM Oli is accompanied by his spouse Radhika Shakya, Chief Political Adviser Bishnu Rimal, and private doctor Dibya Shah, among others, shared PM’s press coordinator Chetan Adhikari.

The PM was seen off by Na-tional Assembly Chair Ganesh Prasad Timilsina, Deputy Prime Minster and Defence Minister Ishwore Pokharel, Home Minster Ram Bahadur Thapa, Minister for Foreign Aff airs Pradeep Gya-wali and NCP general secretary Bishnu Poudel, among others at Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA).

IANSKathmandu

K P Sharma Oli

Only 200 Bangladesh factories pass safety inspection: offi cial

Only 200 out of 1,600 garment factories in Bangladesh have met

the requirements of an in-ternational accord on worker safety, and 400 factories have been barred from taking international orders, the in-dustry body’s president said yesterday.

The Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh was set up by European fash-ion brands to improve fac-tory safety in Bangladesh after as garment factory complex

collapsed in 2013 killing more than 1,100 people.

The fi ve-year pact was origi-nally due to expire in May 2018 but the transition period has been extended. The pact’s fac-tory oversight team will then hand over to a government body set up for that purpose.

Rubana Huq, president of Bangladesh Garment Manufac-turers and Exporters Associa-tion (BGMEA), accused the ac-cord’s members of unilaterally imposing new requirements which were hurting the sector. She said she had met with their inspectors on Saturday to urge them to consult with manufac-turers on their decisions.

“We had an agreement with Accord in May this year that it will not take any decision uni-laterally but that has not been honoured,” she said.

“Since the formation of Accord, we implemented lot of remediation as per its re-quirements that involved huge investment. Now, in the name of fi nal checks, the Ac-cord is asking for several re-mediations.”

Huq also said that of the 1,600 factories inspected by the team between 2014 and 2019, only 200 had been awarded completion certifi cates.

At least 400 factories which inspectors found were to slow

to comply with the new safety rules were as a consequence no longer allowed to accept orders from the Western brands that are members of the accord, she said.

The Bangladesh garment industry is the second largest export earning country after China and the sector represents about 16% of the economy and employs over 4mn workers.

In June, garment manufac-turers demanded higher export subsidies from the government, saying proposals in the latest national budget, unveiled last week, were not enough to com-pensate for higher production costs and low prices.

ReutersDhaka

Exiled Thai critic attacked with chemicals in Japan

An exiled Thai critic of the country’s military and monarchy said he was at-

tacked in his home in Japan last month and believes Thai authori-ties were behind the incident, an accusation that was ridiculed by the kingdom’s army chief.

Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a 48-year-old associate professor at Kyoto University, said he was asleep with his partner when a man broke into their home last month at about 4am and sprayed the couple with a sub-stance that burned their skin.

Neither was seriously hurt,

but Pavin said they have been told by police not to return home. Japanese police con-fi rmed they were investigating a July 8 incident in which a Thai man was sprayed in his house.

“The attacker clearly wanted to intimidate,” said Pavin, add-ing that he had no personal disputes that could have been behind the attack. “The doc-tor said the chemical was not deadly, but said that the burn-ing sensation will stay for quite some time.”

A prominent political dis-sident who has denounced the Thai military’s coups in 2006 and 2014, Pavin has also open-ly criticised King Maha Vaji-ralongkorn, breaking a taboo in

Thailand, where criticising the monarch is illegal.

Pavin accused the army of being behind the attack and said he had been told this by sources. But he said he had no evidence and did not identify the sources or say how they would know.

The suggestion was rejected by Thailand’s army chief, Gen-eral Apirat Kongsompong, who is also head of the king’s Royal Guard Force. He told Reuters he had heard about the attack, but was astonished at any idea that the military could be involved.

“I’d say don’t be too imagi-native. This is not a ‘Mission Impossible’ movie,” Apirat said, adding that a personal dispute might be behind the incident.

“We have our hands full in addressing problems internally in Thailand. And to think that we dispatch people to go assault people overseas - that is impos-sible,” the army chief said.

Pavin said he believed the break-in at his home was part of a trend of attacks on Thai dissi-dents who have fl ed the country.

“I think Thai dissidents now have to be more careful, even those living in the so-called First World,” Pavin said. “Be-cause even in a safe country like Japan an attack can occur. There is no question that they could attack you any time.”

Since December, at least six exiled Thai activists who lived in neigh-bouring Laos have disappeared.

All of those who disappeared had spoken out against the mili-tary and the monarchy.

Criticising the king is punish-able by up to 15 years in prison. Fear of prosecution at home was one reason Pavin applied for and was granted asylum in Japan.

King Vajiralongkorn, who was offi cially crowned in May after the death of his father in 2016, recently swore in a new civilian government headed by former junta chief Prayut Chan-o-cha.

Thailand’s government has said it has no knowledge of any of the disappearances of dissi-dents abroad.

Among the cases that have rattled Thai activists living overseas was that of Chatch-

arn Buppawan, 56, and Kraidej Luelert, 46, whose hand-cuff ed bodies were pulled from the Mekong river that separates Thailand and Laos in December.

The two men, who helped run an anti-junta radio programme, had disappeared from Laos at the same time as their colleague Surachai Danwattananusorn, 78. Surachai’s whereabouts are still unknown.

In February, three other Thai dissidents who had been living in Laos - Siam Theerawut, Krit-sana Thapthai and Chucheep Chiwasut - also went missing after they reportedly travelled to Vietnam, and their wherea-bouts remain unknown.

ReutersBangkok

Thai band fl ees to France for asylum

A Thai activist folk band who went into hiding in Laos have

arrived in Paris to apply for asylum in France, a band member and activist said, after months living in fear of their safety.

Laos, which neighbours Thailand, became a haven af-ter a 2014 coup for some of the most outspoken Thai anti-junta activists, some of whom have been accused of criticis-ing the Thai monarchy.

The unassailable institu-

tion is protected by one of the world’s toughest royal defama-tion laws, under which anyone who insults or defames the monarchy can be jailed for up to 15 years on each charge.

Activist folk band Faiyen - who have campaigned to abolish the lese majeste laws - crossed the border to avoid a summons by the junta and have lived in fear, believing that they are on a hit-list.

But in late July, the band received a special visa from France, which allows them to travel to Paris to jumpstart an asylum application process, said Junya Yimprasert, a Thai activist travelling with them.

“The process to apply for status would have to be done in France,” she said, adding that it would take six months to a year.

“They are already planning their fi rst street performance at the Place de la Republique,” she added.

A Faiyen band member said it felt great to leave Laos, where they received innumerable on-line death threats.

The band wishes to continue “to make music to tell our sto-ry,” Trairong Sinseubpol told AFP from Paris.

The French interior min-istry has not responded yet to requests for comment on Faiyen’s application.

AFPBangkok

Men drive through a flooded road after Wipha typhoon in the Vietnam capital Hanoi yesterday.

Flooded road

Power restored to most areas in Indonesia capital, parts of JavaReutersJakarta

Power has been restored in most parts of Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, after the

city of 10mn people went with-out electricity for more than nine hours due to technical issues, state power company PLN said yesterday.

The outage, which also hit neighbouring provinces, spread across an area home to more than 100mn people and appeared to have aff ected most of the capital,

prompting the use of generators in some offi ces, malls and apart-ments. The blackout began just before noon local time. PLN said it had been able to switch 17 elec-trical substations around Jakarta back on by 9pm but two others were still in the process of being restarted and four remained off .

“The recovery process is still ongoing and indeed it cannot be turned back on at once immedi-ately, but rather gradually we try to normalise with maximum ef-forts,” Sripeni Inten Cahyani, act-ing chief executive of PLN, said in a statement.

At a news conference earlier yesterday, Cahyani said it would take a few more hours to restore power to West Java and Banten provinces.

She blamed faulty transmis-sion circuits on the Ungaran to Pemalang power line in Central Java for causing voltage drops that hit power networks in Jakarta as well as West Java and Banten provinces. “We will investigate to fi nd the root causes and analyse them in detail. We will appoint an independent party to investi-gate,” said Cahyani, who only took up her post. Another PLN offi cial

said two out of three circuits had gone down, triggering “cascading voltage” that caused outages as the west system collapsed. Due to the blackout, the mass rapid tran-sit (MRT) system in Jakarta had to evacuate passengers from trains. The city of Jakarta is the centre for government and business in Indonesia. It does suff er periodic blackouts, but usually short-lived and confi ned to certain areas.

Operations at Jakarta’s inter-national airport remained nor-mal using back-up generators, its operator said via Twitter. Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan also

said via Twitter that public hos-pitals were operating as usual, relying on generators. But at train stations, hundreds of passengers were left stranded after commuter lines stopped working.

“The train stopped all of sud-den, we had to wait for a long time,” said Ella Wasila, a pas-senger near Sudirman station in downtown Jakarta. “There were so many babies in the coach, they were crying, and people were shouting ‘open the door’.”

The power outage also disrupt-ed some cellular phone networks and provider Telkomsel said it

was compiling an inventory of the number of devices aff ected by the power cut. The blackout also caused traffi c lights to go out in some areas of the capital, creat-ing traffi c jams. Wiwik Widay-anti, chief executive of the Jakarta regional train service, said more than 800,000 people used the network per day at a weekend, so buses would be used to transport stranded passengers.

The Indonesian Consumers Foundation (YLKI) said the black-out could discourage investment in Southeast Asia’s biggest econ-omy and urged the government to

increase PLN’s capacity. “Power outages, especially in the Greater Jakarta area, are not only detri-mental for residential consumers but also to the business sector,” Tulus Abadi, an executive at the foundation, said in a statement.

Ordinary Indonesians took to Twitter to express their frus-tration. A Twitter user with the handle @henrydjunaedi said in a post: “I’m a cashless guy, this is nightmare ... So far I can only fi nd one working ATM in a 10km radius. Restaurants and markets are closing or not accepting card payments.”

Hong Kong protesters call for general strike todayReutersHong Kong

Police fi red multiple rounds of tear gas to disperse hun-dreds of anti-government

protesters in Hong Kong yester-day after violent clashes a day earlier, and Beijing said it would not let the situation persist.

The Chinese-controlled city, an Asian fi nancial hub, has been rocked by months of protests that began against a proposed bill to allow people to be extradited to stand trial in mainland China and have developed into calls for greater democracy. A general strike aimed at bringing the city to a halt is planned for today.

Late yesterday, hundreds of masked protesters blocked major roads, spray painted traffi c lights, started fi res and prevented trans-port from entering the Cross-Harbour Tunnel linking Hong Kong island and the Kowloon peninsula.

“We sprayed the traffi c light because we don’t want traffi c to work tomorrow and we don’t want citizens to go to work,” said one protester who was clad from head to toe in black.

Riot police confronted the pro-testers, who have adopted fl ash tactics, shifting quickly from place to place to evade capture and using online platforms such as Telegram to direct hundreds of people.

The government said late yes-terday that “blatant violation of law, wanton destruction of public peace and violent attacks on the police” harm Hong Kong’s socie-

ty and economic livelihood. Such acts had already gone far beyond the limits of peaceful and rational protests, it said in a statement.

After the peaceful demonstra-tions fi nished earlier yesterday, protesters blocked roads in the town of Tseung Kwan O in the New Territories, set up barri-cades and hurled hard objects in-cluding bricks at a police station.

Police fi red tear gas to dis-perse hundreds of protesters af-ter a separate rally in the island’s Western district where thou-sands of people gathered to urge authorities to listen to public demands. Protesters had begun a march towards China’s Liaison Offi ce which has been a fl ash-point at previous protests.

Later yesterday, police fi red tear gas in the shopping area of Causeway Bay to dispel protest-ers, forcing stores and popular

shopping malls including Times Square to close early. Police said the protesters were “participat-ing in an unauthorised assembly”, similar to Saturday when they fi red multiple tear gas rounds in confrontations with black-clad activists in the Kowloon area.

The protests have become the most serious political crisis in Hong Kong since it returned to Chinese rule 22 years ago after being governed by Britain since 1842. China’s offi cial news agen-cy Xinhua said: “The central gov-ernment will not sit idly by and let this situation continue. We fi rmly believe that Hong Kong will be able to overcome the dif-fi culties and challenges ahead.”

The Hong Kong protests have presented the biggest popular challenge to Chinese leader Xi Jinping since he took offi ce in 2012.

During the night, protest-ers split into several diff erent directions to disrupt transport networks. Police said they were “seriously paralysing traffi c and aff ecting emergency services” and warned them to stop imme-diately.

The leaderless nature of the protests has seen participants adopt a strategy called “be wa-ter”, inspired by a maxim of the city’s home-grown martial arts legend, Bruce Lee, that encour-ages them to be fl exible or form-less.

Police said more than 20 peo-ple had been arrested since Sat-urday for off ences including un-lawful assembly and assault.

During yesterday’s protesters marched and brandished col-oured leafl ets, calling for a mass strike across Hong Kong today and shouting “Restore Hong Kong” and “Revolution of our time”.

“We’re trying to tell the gov-ernment to (withdraw) the ex-tradition bill and to police to stop the investigations and the violence,” said Gabriel Lee, a 21-year-old technology student.

Lee said he was particularly angered that the government was not responding to protesters’ de-mands or examining the police violence.

What started as a response to the now suspended extradition bill has grown into demands for greater democracy and the res-ignation of leader Carrie Lam. “Even if Carrie Lam resigns, its

still not resolved. It’s all about the Communist Party, the Chi-nese government,” said Angie, a 24-year-old working for a non-government organisation. On Saturday, protesters set fi res in the streets, outside a police sta-tion and in rubbish bins.

Thousands of civil servants joined in the protests on Fri-day for the fi rst time since they started, defying a warning from authorities to remain politically neutral. The protests have adapt-ed rapidly since the start of June

with the movement spreading from the Admiralty area, where the legislative council is located, across to the whole city for the fi rst time.

Previous protests have also targeted mainland visitors to try to make them understand the situation in Hong Kong, which is officially termed a Special Administrative Region of China. Young people have mostly been at the forefront of the protests, angry about broader problems including

sky-high living costs and what they see as an unfair housing policy skewed towards the rich. Hong Kong has been allowed to retain extensive freedoms, such as an independent judiciary but many residents see the extradi-tion bill as the latest step in a relentless march toward main-land control.

Months of demonstrations are taking a growing toll on the city’s economy, as local shoppers and tourists avoid parts of its famed shopping districts.

Police off icers advance toward anti-extradition bill protesters during a protest in Hong Kong.

A journalist covers her face after police off icers fired tear gas toward anti-extradition bill protesters during a protest in Hong Kong.

Demonstrators are seen amidst smoke from tear gas during an anti-extradition bill protest in Hong Kong.

Pacifi c leaders want summit focus on climate, not ChinaAFPWellington

Pacifi c island leaders insist climate change, not China, will top the agenda when

they meet in Tuvalu this month as western-aligned nations push to curb Beijing’s growing infl u-ence in the region. Once regard-ed as a sleepy backwater of the diplomatic world, the islands are now a hotbed of aid projects and charm off ensives as anxiety over China’s presence grows.

Australia has labelled its campaign the Pacifi c Step-Up, New Zealand has the Pacifi c Re-set and Britain the Pacifi c Uplift, while the United States, Japan, and France have also intensifi ed their eff orts to court the region. But local leaders attending the Pacifi c Islands Forum (PIF) in Tuvalu from August 13-16 are wary their concerns will be side-lined if they become pawns in a wider power struggle.

The 16-member forum main-ly consists of small island na-tions, along with Papua New Guinea, Australia, and New Zealand. PIF secretary-general

Dame Meg Taylor said the fo-rum, whose members collec-tively refer to themselves as the Blue Pacifi c, was at a pivotal moment in its history. “While we are the subject of the geopo-litical manoeuvring and strate-gies of others, the Blue Pacifi c collective remains focused on charting our own destiny,” she said.

The primary concern for is-land leaders – many of whom live in low-lying nations threat-ened by rising seas – is climate change. In a pointed message to Australia’s conservative govern-ment, Tuvalu Prime Minister Enele Sopoaga has warned Can-berra’s step-up strategy will fail unless it fi nally takes meaning-ful action to address the issue. “They know very well that we will not be happy as a partner, to move forward, unless they are serious,” he said. The Pacifi c is-lands saw intense fi ghting dur-ing World War II and displays of power in the Cold War, includ-ing nuclear tests by the United States and France.

But they dropped off the radar for major powers as other regions took priority, a fact recently ac-

knowledged by Britain’s High Commissioner to New Zealand Laura Clarke. “Quite frankly we stepped back too much from our Pacifi c friends and partners,” she said. “We are now beginning to put that balance right.” China has been active in the Pacifi c for well over a decade and, though it still ranks far behind Australia

as the region’s biggest aid donor, there is growing discomfort over its interest in an area Canberra regards as its sphere of infl u-ence.

For China, a presence in the region provides access to as-sets such as fi sheries, as well as giving Beijing the opportunity to try to further diplomatically

isolate Taiwan, which it re-gards as a renegade state. But other regional heavyweights, particularly Australia, fear the ultimate aim is to set up a naval base in the Pacifi c which would dramatically increase Beijing’s military footprint in the area. Such a move would potentially negate the geographic remote-ness that provides Australia and New Zealand with a valuable de-fence buff er.

Whether real or imagined, the possibility has long domi-nated strategic thinking among Australia and its allies about the islands, said Wesley Morgan, a lecturer in international aff airs at the University of the South Pacifi c in Fiji.

“This tendency to see the Pa-cifi c island countries as would-be naval bases and to view them through that lens of maritime competition has done Pacifi c is-land countries a disservice,” he said.

“These countries are signifi -cant players in global politics in their own right,” he added, pointing out it was the islands that helped put climate change on the international agenda.

Morgan said Pacifi c leaders regarded climate change as a greater security risk than China and expected those operating in the region to respect their con-cerns.

He said there was particular disappointment that Australia — led by climate-sceptic Prime Minister Scott Morrison — was dismissive about an issue its neighbours see as an existential threat.

While Canberra had paid lip service to environmental con-cerns, Morgan said island na-tions were acutely aware that, in real terms, it was set to miss Paris emissions targets and had recently approved construc-tion of a major new coal mine. Pacifi c leaders have become in-creasingly critical of Canberra ahead of the Tuvalu meeting and Morgan said they were unlikely to prioritise Canberra’s security concerns regarding China when their own were not being taken seriously.

“As long as countries like Australia fail to take adequate steps to tackle climate change it will undermine their attempts to win over the Pacifi c,” he said.

China destabilising Indo-Pacific: US

The United States says China is destabilising the Indo-Pacific, US Defence Secretary Mark Esper said yesterday, charging Beijing with predatory economics, intellectual property theft and “weaponising the global commons”. The comments by Esper on his first overseas trip as US defence secretary threaten to inflame already heightened tensions between Washington and Beijing as they wage an escalating trade war. China’s increasing assertiveness, especially in the energy-rich South China Sea, has raised concerns within the region and the United States is challenging Chinese maritime hegemony and seeking stronger ties with nations pushing back against Beijing. “We firmly believe no one nation can or should dominate the Indo-Pacific and we are working alongside our allies and partners to address the region’s pressing security needs, Esper told reporters in Sydney. “We also stand firmly against a disturbing pattern of aggressive behaviour, destabilising behaviour from China. This includes weaponising the global commons, using predatory economics and debt for sovereignty deals, and promoting state-sponsored theft of other nations’ intellectual property.”

Japanese woman tested for EbolaDPA Tokyo

A Japanese woman in her 70s is being tested for a possible Eb-ola infection, the Japan Times

reported yesterday, citing the Health Ministry. The woman, from Saitama Prefecture near Tokyo, had returned from Congo on Wednesday and de-veloped a temperature of 39.2F late Saturday, the ministry said in a state-ment.

It emphasised that the test was a precaution and said the result would be released by the National Institute of Infectious Diseases as soon as it was available. The woman said she had not had any contact with Ebola patients while she was in Congo, the ministry said. Thursday marked a year since the start of an Ebola epi-demic in Congo, the second-worst on record. It has led to more than 1,800 deaths in the central African nation.

8 Gulf TimesMonday, August 5, 2019

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BRITAIN9Gulf Times

Monday, August 5, 2019

Teen heldin bid tokill child at TateModernGuardian News and MediaLondon

A teenager has been ar-rested on suspicion of attempted murder after

a six-year-old boy was thrown from the 10th-fl oor viewing platform at the Tate Modern, the Metropolitan police have said.

The child was taken to hos-pital by the air ambulance after being found on a fi fth-fl oor roof and is in a critical condition, the Met said.

A 17-year-old boy remained with members of the public on the viewing platform and was arrested by police offi cers on suspicion of attempted murder and taken into custody.

“There is nothing to suggest that he is known to the victim,” the Met said. The mental health of the suspect is one line of in-quiry, although he was at least initially detained in a police cell.

The six-year-old boy was with family members at the world-fa-mous art gallery with witnesses reportedly hearing his mother shout “my son, that’s my son” as he fell fi ve fl oors. The family are being supported by police.

Visitors to the gallery said they were kept inside as offi cers dealt with the incident, while others posted images of fi re-fi ghters and the air ambulance outside the gallery on the South Bank in central London. The Met said: “A teenager has been ar-rested after a child was thrown from height in Southwark.

“Police were called at around 2.40pm yesterday to reports of a young boy thrown from the 10th-fl oor viewing platform of the Tate Modern in Bankside SE1.

“Offi cers attended along with colleagues from London ambu-lance service and London’s air ambulance.

“The six-year-old victim was found on a fi fth-fl oor roof. He was treated at the scene and taken to hospital by London’s air ambulance. The boy’s condition is critical; his family are being supported by police”.

Labour slump sparks calls for Corbyn to goDaily MailLondon

Jeremy Corbyn faced fresh calls to quit after Labour’s disastrous showing in the

by-election.The party slumped to fourth

in the Brecon and Radnorshire seat, behind the Brexit Party, Tories and LibDems. Labour’s candidate Tom Davies picked up just 1,680 votes, down al-most 5,000 on its third-place showing at the 2017 general election.

This amounted to just 5.3% of the vote, just above the threshold of 5% to avoid the party losing its £500 deposit to take part in the election.

Labour’s vote share has fall-en by 12.5 percentage points since 2017 – the largest slump among any of the parties.

The result strengthens the hand of Corbyn’s critics, who say his fence-sitting on Brexit is costing the party votes.

Corbyn said he was ‘dis-appointed’ by the result, adding: “The Liberal Demo-crats won it after doing a

deal with Plaid Cymru and the Greens.

“I think that a lot of voters were determined to get rid of the Conservatives and they voted accordingly.”

But he still faced fresh calls to go. Pat Glass, the former La-bour MP for North West Dur-ham, tweeted: “Let’s not for-get that Labour... got just 5% of the vote and came in fourth behind the Brexit Party.

“When are we in the Labour Party going to wise up, smell the coff ee and get ourselves a new leader?”

Ian Austin, the independent MP for Dudley North, who quit Labour over anti-Semitism, tweeted: “Corbyn is certainly consistent, as well as hopeless. If Labour MPs and the shadow cabinet won’t get rid of him because of the racism and ex-tremism that has poisoned La-bour, surely they’ll act out of self-interest?”

Meanwhile, LibDem leader Jo Swinson told The Times she was ruling out a Remain alli-ance with Labour, saying Cor-byn could not be trusted on Brexit.

UK care spending ‘amongworst in western Europe’Daily MailLondon

Britain spends less on so-cial care than nearly all the other countries in western

Europe. The UK is ranked 10th out of 12 comparable nations, with its level of state social care spending just half that of Nor-way and the Netherlands.

Only Portugal and Spain are below Britain. However, they – like most other Mediterranean countries – see relatives play a much greater role in caring for loved ones.

Analysis based on fi gures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development show the UK spent £695 on so-cial care per head of population in 2017.

This compared with £1,530 in Norway, £1,451 in the Neth-erlands, £1,222 in Sweden and £1,033 in Switzerland. Germany spent £777 per head and France £722. Spain and Portugal were at the bottom with £218 and £208 per head respectively.

Separate fi gures also expose a huge variation in the UK, with spending in England 43% lower than in Scotland and 33% below Wales.

Dementia patients are among the worst aff ected by the spend-ing shortfall as they account for two thirds of patients who need social care, either in their own homes or in a care home.

The analysis by the Health Foundation think-tank only looked at state-funded social care. The fact that the UK’s spending lags so far behind means patients are either having to cover the costs themselves, or go without and face neglect.

Allies of Boris Johnson say social care will be one of his top priorities – although it emerged yesterday that reform plans have again been delayed at least until autumn.

One of the main reasons the UK is so far down the rankings is its strict eligibility criteria for so-cial care under which thousands of patients are turned down.

Anyone with assets of more than £23,250 – including the

value of their house – has to pay privately for a place in a care home.

Patients being cared for at home must fund it themselves if their assets are above £23,250 excluding the value of their house.

The Health Foundation’s analysis of spending in the UK nations used diff erent data from that of the OECD, which has a specifi c defi nition of ‘social care’.

It showed that in England about £310 is invested per head a year, compared with £445 in Scotland and £414 in Wales.

Anita Charlesworth, of the Health Foundation, said: “When the current system is explained to people, almost everyone agrees it’s inadequate and unfair. Social care funding has failed to keep pace with increasing de-mand of an ageing population and more working-age adults in need of care. Responsibility for paying for care has increasingly shifted from the state towards individuals and their families, leaving increasing numbers without the support they need.”

Prime ministerunveils £1.8bn funding forNHS hospitalsReutersLondon

Prime Minister Boris John-son will fast-track fund-ing for the public health

service, announcing £1.8bn to upgrade 20 hospitals, part of the new leader’s push to meet his Brexit pledges.

Johnson, a fi gurehead for the “Leave” campaign in the 2016 referendum, promoted the idea emblazoned on a bus that Britain could spend £350mn a week on the National Health Service if it left the European Union.

The new prime minister is moving quickly to meet that and other Brexit pledges, a bid to restore some of the trust in politicians that has been eroded in the three years since the ref-erendum that deeply divided the country.

But by ushering in a spending spree on health, education and policing after years of economic austerity, Johnson has fuelled expectations of an early election — something his team says will not happen before Britain leaves the EU on October 31.

Writing in the Sunday Times newspaper, Johnson said he wanted to get more funding to the frontline of the NHS to try to stop the “the delays, the cancel-lations”.

“Which is why I am so de-termined to deliver now on the promises of that 2016 referen-dum campaign: not just to hon-our the will of the people, but to increase the cash available for this amazing national institu-tion,” he wrote.

“It is thanks to this country’s

strong economic performance that we are now able to an-nounce £1.8bn more for the NHS to buy vital new kit and confi rm new upgrades for 20 hospitals across the country.”

A source confi rmed the gov-ernment was planning to bring forward a commitment made by his predecessor Theresa May to give the NHS an additional £20bn by 2023 to boost a service that is one of Britain’s most be-loved institutions.

Johnson has said he is willing to funnel more money into pub-lic services, using the previous government’s so-called “fi scal headroom”, which had been ear-marked to support the economy through a no-deal.

But on Thursday, the Bank of England lowered its growth fore-casts, showing a one-in-three chance that the economy would be shrinking in annual terms by the end of the fi rst quarter of next year, even without a disrup-tive Brexit.

Asked where the money would come from for the NHS, James Cleverly, chairman of the gov-erning Conservative Party, said the funding would come from “economic growth”.

“We’re now in a place where the economy is performing sig-nifi cantly better, much better, and that enables us to do what all governments want to do which is to make sure the public services on which people rely are in good order,” he told Sky News.

But the main opposition La-bour Party said the pledge for the NHS did not go far enough to rebuild a service.

“Our NHS is facing a backlog of £6bn worth of repairs, putting

patients safety, patients lives at risk every day,” Labour’s health policy chief Jon Ashworth said, adding that the opposition party would put more money in.

Ashworth said he suspect-ed the government was on an election footing for later this year, when Labour and even some Conservative lawmakers say they will do anything to try to stop Johnson from leading Britain out of the EU without a deal.

It is widely expected that La-bour will bring a motion of no-confi dence in the government after parliament returns to work in September to try to stop a no-deal, but Johnson’s top aide was reported as saying such a move would not work.

Dominic Cummings, one of the architects of the Leave campaign, was reported by the Sunday Telegraph as saying that Johnson could schedule a na-tional election after the October 31 deadline if he lost a vote of no confi dence.

“(Lawmakers) don’t realise that if there is a no-confi dence vote in September or October, we’ll call an election for after the 31st and leave anyway,” Cum-mings was quoted by one source as saying.

Ashworth was undeterred.“There will be opportunities

for us when parliament returns in September to stop no-deal,” Ashworth told Sky News. “The government will have to bring forward appropriate legislation to prepare for this Brexit no-deal exit that they want. And we will use all the means available to us in parliament... and we will work to stop no-deal.”

People stand by the entrance to the Tate Modern gallery in London yesterday after it was put on lock down and evacuated after an incident involving a child falling from height and being airlifted to hospital.

Jeremy Corbyn: facing backlash

Edinburgh fest performers refuse sterling payments due to BrexitGuardian News and MediaLondon

Increasing numbers of artists are asking to be paid in dol-lars and euros instead of ster-

ling because of Brexit uncertain-ty, the director of the Edinburgh international festival has said.

The three-week arts festival opened on Friday and includes

293 performances by 2,600 art-ists from 40 countries. Speak-ing during its opening weekend, Fergus Linehan, who has been its director since 2015, said many performers had refused to be paid in sterling.

Linehan said organisers had taken the decision around No-vember last year to hedge £1mn – locking it into a particular ex-change rate to protect against

future fl uctuations – to guaran-tee artists’ fees.

“When a currency is very low but solid people don’t mind se-curing their fees in it,” he said. “But if they think (the value) is going to bounce around they want more security.” The pound fell to its lowest level in 28 months on Tuesday as the government insisted it was pre-pared to leave the EU without a

deal. Sterling hit a low of $1.2120 against the dollar, while also sliding against the euro, at one point hitting €1.0881.

Linehan said that the unstable pound meant that staging the fes-tival had become more expensive at a time when public funding for the event was being cut. “There is a cost attached to hedging and we’ve also got this very low cur-rency level at the moment, which

doesn’t seem to be going any-where but down,” he said.

“It’s not so much individual artists who are very expensive,” said Linehan. “It’s more about the scale of ambition which is obviously dented at a certain point. Every (extra cost) slices another bit of potential away.”

Linehan said the inability to plan ahead because of Brexit uncertainty was “the opposite

of cost eff ective”. He said: “I’m sure it’s much worse for people who are running car factories. Conversations around planning and where we should be going have just been in hiatus for what seems like forever.

“Of course all of this pales into insignifi cance if we have a serious downturn in the econ-omy. The real worry is if this starts to bite into people’s day-

to-day lives in terms of jobs.”This year’s festival, with its

budget of just under £12mn, opened with a performance from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, led by its conductor, Gustavo Dudamel. Highlights include a new version of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring by Chinese choreog-rapher Yang Liping and stage shows featuring Ian McKellen and Stephen Fry.

10 Gulf TimesMonday, August 5, 2019

BRITAIN

Travel chaos looms asHeathrow staff to strike

Daily MailLondon

One in fi ve fl ights could be cancelled at Hea-throw hitting 88,000

passengers if a 48-hour strike goes ahead today, union lead-ers warned. Hundreds of thou-sands of holidaymakers are ex-pected to be aff ected as part of the strike mayhem.

Members of militant un-ion Unite – including security staff , engineers and fi refi ghters – have voted overwhelmingly to reject a pay rise worth 7.3% over two-and-a-half years.

Although talks between union offi cials and Heathrow have re-sumed in the hope of reaching a peace deal, both parties warned the walkout today and tomorrow now looks likely to go ahead.

Unite said 88% of members who cast a vote opted to reject the revised off er. Up to half a million people are expected to pass through Britain’s busi-est airport during the planned 48-hour walkout – timed to coincide with the height of the summer holidays.

Unite has threatened to shut down Heathrow and claimed that more than 4,000 of its members, who also include customer service staff and trolley workers, are likely to take part. But Heathrow in-sisted the airport would re-main ‘safe and open’, although bosses warned that queues at security are likely to be long-er. It revealed that 177 of the 2,600 fl ights scheduled over the two days have already been cancelled in anticipation of a mass walkout. Flights have been switched to other air-ports including Gatwick, Bir-mingham and Manchester.

Meanwhile, an army of around 1,200 Heathrow staff – including highly-paid ex-ecutives – are on standby to fi ll roles vacated by protesting union members.

These include baggage han-dlers and workers helping pas-sengers with security.

The airport has even ar-ranged for Surrey fi re brigade to step in – as fi refi ghters em-ployed directly by Heathrow are among those preparing to strike.

11mn homes to benefi tfrom energy price capGuardian News and MediaLondon

Millions of homes in the UK could be in line for a reduction of £80 on

their energy bills this winter under plans from the industry regulator to lower the energy price cap.

This week, Ofgem is widely expected to announce a lower cap on energy bills for 11mn homes using standard variable energy tariff s, which could cut the average annual bill by 6%.

The regulator’s tighter cap on energy bills would take ef-fect from October and remain in place through the winter months, to bring bills in line with lower gas market prices.

However, energy companies have warned the welcome news for households could be a death blow for smaller energy startups.

Eleven small energy compa-nies have gone bust in recent years, many of which off ered unsustainably low energy deals

in order to lure customers away from incumbent players.

The lower price threshold for energy deals could put extra pressure on the small challeng-ers ahead of the annual deadline for energy company payments.

In the past, failed energy upstarts have left a total of £170mn-worth of renewable energy subsidies unpaid, after collecting them through energy bills, which the regulator clawed back through extra charges for established energy companies.

Energy bosses are understood to be frustrated because they feel forced to bail out the companies that are reducing their market share.

Ofgem has recently raised the fi nancial requirements for com-panies to be granted an energy supply licence to crack down on the number of unsustainable suppliers competing to supply an essential home service.

But British Gas and SSE, the two largest suppliers in the mar-ket, are also calling for the ener-gy price cap to be scrapped.

The cap was brought in by the Conservative government after the Labour party made freezing rising energy bills one of its 2015 election pledges, to protect con-sumers against “rip-off ” energy tariff s.

Iain Conn, the outgoing boss of British Gas’s parent company, Centrica, said Boris Johnson’s government should consider scrapping the cap.

SSE has said it plans to use a new government consultation on the energy market to call for an overhaul of the energy price cap.

It said Ofgem should contin-ue to intervene in the market to protect vulnerable energy cus-tomers who may fi nd it diffi cult to shop around for a better deal. Otherwise, the regulator should abandon a mandatory cap on en-ergy deals in favour of a bench-mark guide price.

Rebecca Long-Bailey, La-bour’s shadow business and en-ergy secretary, said there was a danger that Johnson would “hike up energy bills for millions of people” by scrapping the cap.

Patel criticisedover wish for criminals ‘to feel terror’Guardian News and MediaLondon

The new Home Secretary, Priti Patel, has been criti-cised after she said she

wants criminals “to literally feel terror” once she begins her law and order reforms.

Patel indicated a sharp right-ward turn in the government’s approach to crime, which comes after Boris Johnson, the prime minister, announced plans to re-cruit 20,000 new police offi cers.

“I fundamentally think the Conservative party is the party of law and order. Full stop,” Pa-tel told the Daily Mail, in her fi rst interview since Johnson ap-pointed her home secretary. She vowed to “empower (police) to stop criminality.”

“My focus now is restating our commitment to law and order and restating our commitment to the people on the frontline, the police,” Patel said.

“I’ve always felt the Con-servative party is the party of the police and police offi cers … quite frankly, with more police offi c-ers out there and greater police presence, I want (criminals) to literally feel terror at the thought of committing off ences.”

The shadow home secretary Diane Abbott said Patel’s “tough rhetoric” would not end “soar-ing crime”.

“We need more offi cers and resources for the police to work with our communities, not to risk alienating them with draco-nian powers,” she said.

The Liberal Democrat home aff airs spokesman Ed Davey called Patel, the MP for Witham, Essex, “out of touch”.

“Patel’s notion that making people terrifi ed of the police will cut crime shows just how out of touch she is with what’s leading

some young people into crime in the fi rst place,” Davey said.

“So often, young people say they carry knives because they are afraid of other young people in gangs. We need more police so these young people can feel less afraid as they now trust the po-lice to be there, not because the police add to their fears.”

The appointment is a reversal of fortunes for Patel, who was sacked from the government two years ago after breaking the ministerial code by secretly and unoffi cially meeting Israeli ministers, busi-nesspeople and a senior lobbyist.

One of 30 Tory Brexit ultras who voted against the former prime minister Theresa May’s EU deal at every opportunity, Patel’s elevation to the Home Offi ce is regarded as a key com-ponent of what political com-mentators are calling the most right-wing Cabinet since the Thatcher years.

Patel indicated a return to a hard line on drugs off ences after some forces had apparently not been taking action on possession.

“Any form of drug use – you don’t turn a blind eye to it at all. It has a corrosive impact on peo-ple and communities,” she said.

The LibDems accused Patel of “rank hypocrisy” over the zero-tolerance approach, consider-ing a series of admissions from senior Tory colleagues. Johnson promoted Michael Gove to the Cabinet after he was forced to admit using cocaine 20 years ago at social events.

Dominic Raab was made the foreign secretary and Andrea Leadsom the business secretary after saying they had used can-nabis as students.

The LibDem MP Christine Jar-dine, who has worked for access to medicinal cannabis, called for a “pragmatic, evidence-based approach” to drugs.

A general view of Toddbrook Reservoir, the spillway of which suff ered severe damage following a period of heavy rainfall, above the town of Whaley Bridge in northern England.

Safety fears for dam persistas thunderstorms forecastGuardian News and MediaLondon

Thunderstorms are threat-ening to bring more un-wanted rainfall to a Der-

byshire town where a damaged dam is thought to be at risk of collapse.

Whaley Bridge remained ee-rily quiet yesterday morning as residents anxiously waited, with forecasters predicting days of heavy rain.

Meanwhile, those who were evacuated from their homes were told yesterday they would no longer be able to return to collect vital items. More than 1,500 residents were initially told by emergency services they would be allowed to briefl y re-turn home yesterday to collect any necessary items, pets and medication they had left behind.

But the weather forecast

forced police to reverse the de-cision amid heightened safety concerns over the damaged dam at Toddbrook reservoir.

After a command team meet-ing yesterday morning, Derby-shire police said its decision was taken due to emergency service workers prioritising the “pres-ervation of life”.

The force added: “While there was an urgent need over the past 24 hours to allow resi-dents back into the area, our fi rst duty is to protect the lives of the public and emergency services.” Hazel Thompson, who grew up in the town, said residents were waiting to see what would hap-pen with the weather.

“We have been told that they have now stopped dropping the aggregate and they are just work-ing hard to lower the water levels even more,” Thompson said.

She added: “Some roads have now been completely closed

off and if residents leave their homes they are no longer being allowed to go back in.”

Gavin Tomlinson, Derby-shire’s deputy chief fi re offi cer, said teams at Whaley Bridge had made good progress overnight.

“We now know we have taken around 35% of the contents of reservoir out now and we are aiming to get it down about 25% where we think it is at a safe level,” he said. “So what we have done is concentrated our eff orts on making sure all the pumps run to full capacity.

“That means as the water lev-el drops – the reservoir doesn’t have straight sides, it comes in (with sloping sides) – so we have to keep relocating the pumps further and further in.”

Just over six miles away in the town of Marple, on the out-skirts of Stockport, the army has been deployed amid fears the River Goyt could overfl ow.

Water from the Toddbrook res-ervoir is being released into lo-cal waterways, which is leading to an increased risk of fl ooding in nearby areas.

Greater Manchester police said there was the potential for the situation at the reservoir to aff ect Marple, but stressed there were no plans to evacuate the town and said advice was being given out as a precaution.

The Canal and River Trust estimated on Saturday that 105,000 cubic metres (23mn gallons) of water had been pumped out in 12 hours with water levels being reduced by 1.3 metres since Thursday, but the condition of the structure remained critical.

An RAF Chinook helicopter put 400 tonnes of sandbags on the aff ected part of the dam on Friday and added a further 70 on Saturday.

Daniel Greenhalgh, a region-

al director at the trust, which owns the reservoir and dam, said: “We are not out of the woods yet. The last estimate was that residents could be out of their homes for seven days yet.” The trust has defended the maintenance and safety of the 188-year-old structure.

Greenhalgh said: “This dam was inspected regularly by us and an independent engineer. It needs to be remembered there was a huge amount of rain in a short time and this fl ooded the area.”

A further 55 homes in the Horwich End area of the town were cleared on Saturday evening, two days after 1,500 residents left.

Derbyshire police allowed one person from each of the 400 properties evacuated on Thurs-day to return for a 15-minute visit on Saturday to pick up pets and other essentials.

Copies of the September issue of British Vogue are displayed for sale in London, Britain. Meghan has become the first royal to guest-edit the fashion magazine, bringing together 15 ‘trailblazers’ and ‘changemakers’ for a special ‘Forces for Change’ issue.

Meghan’s Vogue stint

Victims’ commissioner to meet abused woman as attacker freedGuardian News and MediaLondon

The victims’ commissioner for England and Wales is to call for increased sup-

port for domestic abuse victims after a woman went into hiding when her violent ex-partner was released from prison early.

Dame Vera Baird will meet Abigail Blake today to discuss her case and ways to improve ex-periences for other victims.

Blake sustained a broken back and neck and was left perma-nently disabled after Sebastian Swamy attacked her at their home in July 2017. He removed her mobile phone so she could not call 999, and she was rescued by neighbours as she lay uncon-scious outside the property with a severed spinal cord, fi ve broken ribs and a punctured lung.

Six months after he was sen-tenced to three years and four months in prison, Swamy was granted early release. Blake, 42,

a mother-of-two, said her case raised serious concerns about the way the justice system sup-ports domestic violence victims.

Baird, the victims’ commis-sioner, has said victims need more support to feel safe.

“We all have a duty to ensure they feel safe and supported when they make the often pain-ful decision to report the crimes being committed against them,” Baird said. “This means having appropriate public protection arrangements to keep them safe

and give them peace of mind. And it is important the criminal justice system recognises the suff ering of victims and their children by handing down ap-propriate sentences for convict-ed perpetrators.”

Swamy, a telecoms execu-tive, was initially charged with causing grievous bodily harm with intent but admitted a lesser charge of grievous bodily harm (GBH), saying he had been drinking heavily on the night of the attack.

Blake, from Knutsford in Cheshire, only met CPS lawyers on the day Swamy was sentenced in January this year. She received no legal advice and was urged by the police to accept his plea bargain to avoid the trauma of a trial. She believed Swamy would spend a minimum of 20 months of a three-year sentence in pris-on.

However, the time Swamy had spent on bail wearing an elec-tronic tag was taken into account as part of his custodial sentence

and he was granted early release.Swamy was given a travel war-

rant and was allowed to make his way from Wrexham prison to his family home in Berkshire with-out a police escort, prompting Blake to go into hiding for 24 hours with her infant son.

Swamy is now once again wearing a tag and is under a home detention curfew. He was also handed an indefi nite re-straining order and any breach of this would result in a recall to prison.

Before his release, Blake was not consulted about the licens-ing arrangement, as is usual practice.

She said: “He left me for dead and now he is out. This is a daily hell, and will be for years. Forev-er looking over my back, laying in bed paralysed hearing sounds. Scared to death for the children and I. This is not living, this is existing, all while for Sebastian it’s the start of a new life having had zero punishment (as a result of) his abysmal sentencing”.

EUROPE11Gulf Times

Monday, August 5, 2019

A French daredevil who spent years developing a jet-powered hoverboard

zoomed across the English Chan-nel yesterday, fulfi lling his quest after pulling off a tricky refuel-ling manoeuvre that cut short his fi rst attempt 10 days ago.

Franky Zapata blasted off on his “Flyboard” from Sangatte on the northern coast of France at 8.17am (0617 GMT) for the 35km (22-mile) trip to St Margaret’s Bay in Dover.

Escorted by three helicopters, he soared across the water in the early morning light and landed 22 minutes later in the picturesque bay, to the applause of dozens of onlookers and journalists.

“I’m feeling good. I’m feeling

happy, I’m feeling lucky. This is just an amazing moment for me,” Zapata told AFP after landing.

He said the indicators in the visor of his helmet showed he raced over the busy shipping lane at a speed of 160-170kph (100-105mph), doing zig-zags as he neared the coast to try to ease the fatigue in his legs.

Minutes after descending from the metal platform where he landed his craft, Zapata broke down in tears of emotion while talking on the phone to his 10-year-old son, who could be heard saying, “Dad, you’re the best!”

“I was almost at my limits – there was still enough fuel in my pack for another 10km or so. Maybe I could have done fi ve or six,” Zapata said later at a press conference back in Sangatte.

“People are passionate about this, everyone dreams about fl y-ing,” he said, recalling his fasci-nation with the hoverboard in the 1985 hit movie Back to the Future, set in 2015.

“And then 2015 came around, and there were still no hover-boards, so we said ‘OK, we’re go-ing to do it’.”

Zapata, a 40-year-old former jet-ski champion, made his fi rst attempt on July 25, to coin-cide with the 110th anniversary of Louis Bleriot’s historic fi rst crossing of the Channel by plane.

However, he had to be fi shed from the water after failing to land on a boat to refuel – his backpack carries some 35kg (77 pounds) of kerosene, enough to keep him aloft for around 10 minutes.

This time the refuelling boat was bigger, with a larger landing area.

Asked if he considered himself Bleriot’s successor, Zapata told BFM television: “It’s not really comparable, he was one of the fi rst men to fl y. Let’s just say that I achieved my dream.”

Zapata has been working on the hoverboard for the past three years, despite losing parts of two fi ngers during its maiden fl ight in

his garage near Marseille, when they got sucked into the turbines.

Dyslexic and colourblind, Za-pata left school at 16.

But his determination shined in international jetski racing.

“He couldn’t distinguish be-tween the yellow and red buoys indicating the route on the right or on the left,” his friend and former rival Vincent Lagaf, told Franceinfo. “So he stayed in sec-ond or third place to follow the others until the last lap, then he went all out to win.”

The son of a construction con-tractor, he was always passionate about mechanics.

Zapata worked out how to make his jetskis more powerful.

“Stuntman, pilot, entrepre-neur, inventor – I’m not sure what I am, a little bit of every-thing and nothing at the same time,” Zapata said recently.

He already holds the Guinness World Record for the farthest hoverboard fl ight, a 2.2km trip over the Mediterranean Sea in April 2016.

No Guinness adjudicator was on hand for the latest Channel attempt, though a spokeswoman said he could still be awarded a new record if the trip meets its guidelines.

Zapata burst into the spotlight at this year’s July 14 Bastille Day military parade in Paris, where he buzzed above a crowd of stunned onlookers that included French President Emmanuel Macron.

His device has also captured the attention of the French de-fence ministry, which in De-cember gave Zapata’s company, Z-AIR, a €1.3mn ($1.4mn) devel-opment grant, in particular for improving the turbines.

“It’s not the return of the Avengers, it’s a reality. Bravo Franky Zapata,” Defence Minister Florence Parly tweeted after Za-pata’s feat.

Zapata eventually hopes to soar into the clouds at altitudes well above the 15m to 20m (50-65’) currently – something that will require him to fi gure out how to carry a parachute, guidance

equipment and an oxygen tank.But he is aiming even higher:

This year he hopes to unveil a 10-turbine fl ying car that would be easy enough for anyone to pi-lot, without requiring the physi-cal strength and long hours of practice to master the Flyboard.

“We expect to have the au-

thorisations for test fl ights in the coming days,” he said back in Sangatte, adding that it would initially have a range of 100-120km.

“We’re going to take a bit of holiday ... and then the whole team will get back to work so it’s ready on time.”

‘Flyboarding’ Frenchman zooms across the ChannelBy Zoe Leroy and Dario Thuburn, AFPSangatte, France

Zapata poses with a placard after he succeeded in crossing the English Channel on a jet-powered flyboard.

In this screen grab, Franky Zapata stands on his jet-powered “flyboard” as he arrives at St. Margaret’s Bay in Dover, during his attempt to fly across the 35-km (22-mile) Channel crossing in 20 minutes.

Frenchman achieves ‘dream’ of first hoverboard Channel crossing

Christine, a retiree from southwest France, has been attending marches

with climate activists since No-vember.

Now she’s taking things a step further with a stay in a training camp for activists.

Participants have 12 days to learn a range of techniques de-veloped by veteran activists: everything from getting the me-dia’s attention to passively re-sisting the police.

“I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror if I didn’t act,” said Christine, mingling with young-er people and family groups at the camp in the eastern town of Kingersheim.

While the atmosphere is re-laxed and good humoured, the thousand people at the camp, many of them new to activism, are all quite serious about their goal – to learn the techniques used by the new generation of climate campaigners.

First they learn the basics;

how to crowd-fund a campaign; use online networks securely; get their message across at dem-os and lobby local politicians.

First aid classes are provided.Other key elements of the

training, organised by a network of activists’ groups, include learning non-violent techniques while resisting the authorities and using civil disobedience to promote their cause.

In neighbouring Germany, all these techniques were applied during mass protests near an open-cast lignite mine in June – quickly followed by a peaceful mass occupation of the site that generated widespread media coverage.

“When I do marches for the climate, I see people passing who don’t look, so I suddenly thought it’s important to be able to make placards that stand out,” says 15-year-old Myriam Tre-moulinas, her face lit up with a smile.

She was leaning over a fl ag on which she painted a logo as part of a workshop on making mate-rials for demos.

She is also learning to make

“armlocks”: tubes activists wear to transform themselves into human chains.

It will not be long before some of the people here get a chance to put this training into practice.

The next G7 summit will take place at Biarritz, on the south-west coast of France at the end of the month.

When the fi rst of these “cli-mate camps” was organised in 2016, 300 people turned up to be trained.

The following summer, there were 600.

“This year, we’ve just crossed a threshold,” says Khaled Gaiji, president of Les Amis de la Terre (Friends of the Earth).

From being just a few margin-al activists, they have become a social phenomenon.

“It’s a good thing to learn civil disobedience when the states aren’t acknowledging the scale of the emergency,” says Joe Spiegel, mayor of Kingersheim, who provides the venue for the camp, as well as for concerts and other presentations.

Some skills are more diffi cult to master than others.

One training course involves how to deal with the police when they intervene, which requires a certain amount of role-playing.

“You learn not to struggle but not to cooperate either when you’re being moved,” trainer Nicolas Rangeon explains.

Participants are taught to go limp, obliging the police to shift their dead weight while not ac-tually off ering any active resist-ance.

It is easier said than done, says Rangeon. “It’s not easy when you’re under stress to relax completely.”

The would-be activists are also encouraged to think care-fully about the level of danger

they are prepared to risk: not just their physical safely, but the legal implications of what they are doing – how far they are pre-pared to go.

Zoe Lavocat, spokeswoman for Alternatiba-ANV-COP21, one of the other organisations involved in the training, explains that several of their activists have been arrested during an ongoing campaign of direct ac-tion.

It involves taking down the portrait of President Emmanuel Macron that hangs in city halls across France to protest what they say is his lack of action against climate change.

The climax of the camp will be a simulated action when the trainee activists will take part in an act of mass civil disobedi-ence.

They will role-play not just the activists but police and jour-nalists covering the event.

Christine does not see herself in the frontline of the action.

“But my limits are changing,” she said. “The things I was doing at the beginning are no longer enough.”

‘Climate camps’ train activists in protestBy Béatrice Roman-Amat, AFPKingersheim, France

People take part in a workshop to learn how to act during demonstrations, during an Alternatiba climate camp in Kingersheim, eastern France.

Violet Mihasi doesn’t hide her concern while work-ing on her barge on a salt

lagoon in the southern tip of Al-bania, her mussels clinging to ropes dangled in the water.

The mussel farmer fears an-other poor harvest this year of the particularly fl eshy mussel, dubbed the “Queen of Butrint”, which is suff ocating as tempera-tures rise.

The warmer waters of the Butrint Lagoon on the Ionian coast, not far from the Greek bor-der, also encourage parasites that starve the bivalves of oxygen.

To rid the mussels of the mi-croorganisms, the farmers pull the ropes out of the water, allow-ing them to “breathe” on the sur-face for two days before plunging them back in, Mihasi says.

Nevertheless, harvests have still signifi cantly dropped over the last three decades.

In 1990, some 6,000 tonnes

of mussels were pulled from the ropes dangling from the barges, according to agriculture ministry fi gures.

Nowadays, in a good year, the haul for the lagoon’s around 60 mussel farmers is barely half that.

And last year, it dropped to 2,000 tonnes, when water tem-peratures were stuck at more

than 25° Celsius (77° Fahrenheit).Half of the young mussels,

known as spat, which were im-mersed on the ropes at the start of the summer, died in 2018.

In the three previous years, the devastation was even worse, at closer to 90%, one of the Butrint mussel farmers told AFP.

The deadly temperature

threshold has already been reached this summer, although July storms brought some relief.

“When the heatwave suff o-cates the mussels ... everything is lost,” says Mihasi, in her fi fties, with a sun-weathered face.

After the mussels mature on the ropes, they are hoisted up with old rusty winches.

For Mihasi’s hard work under a blazing sun – warded off by an old parasol and often eased by a strong wind – the mother of two earns slightly less than €500 ($560) a month, about €100 above the average for Albania.

But her income all depends on the success of the year’s haul and she and other producers worry about the future amid dire warn-ings by experts.

Roland Kristo, deputy agricul-ture minister and a biologist, told AFP that the fall in the mussel population was “a direct conse-quence of global warming, which deteriorates the quality of the water and reduces the solubility of the oxygen” vital for the mus-sels.

For Edmond Panariti, a toxi-cologist from the capital, Tirana, global warming now threatens the “very survival” of the Butrint mussel.

“The rise in water tempera-tures in recent years has aggra-vated the problems for the eco-system,” he told AFP.

It’s not the fi rst setback for the producers.

The Butrint mussel farmers remain under a 1994 European Union export ban because of distribution problems, but they still fi nd ready customers among Albania’s markets and restaura-teurs.

A single prolonged heatwave can be fatal for the spat.

“For the past three or four years, more than half of the an-nual production has been de-stroyed in a few days,” said Alket Shabani, a 27-year-old worker on a mussel boat.

If the mercury continues to rise this summer, “everything will be over”, he said.

His 67-year-old boss Hysni Mane, who also runs a seafood

restaurant, noted that the mus-sels are defenceless against the heat: “They cannot move to fi nd another cooler place.”

The problems are exacerbated, he said, by an upset in the ex-change of seawater with that of the lagoon and nearby cooler freshwater sources, as well as rising sea levels and precipita-tion regimes, which he blamed on global warming.

On this summer’s hottest days, temperatures reached nearly 30C on the surface, penetrating as much as 2.5m (8’) into the water, said Kristo, the deputy agricul-ture minister.

Panariti added: “Even a water temperature of 24-25C is fatal for the mussels because they strug-gle to survive and reproduce un-der the stress.”

Anila Shallari, a geographer at Paul Valery University in Montpellier, France, said: “Mi-croorganisms that degrade or-ganic substances become very active and consume all the avail-able oxygen.”

The authorities have vowed to

tackle the problem but are con-strained by a lack of resources in the poor Balkan country.

To cool the lagoon’s water and help “oxygenise” it, engineers would have to dredge the channel linking it to the sea.

They must also increase the fl ow of cold water from the Bis-trica river – slowed by two small hydropower plants upstream – into the lagoon.

In April, they opened the dams’ fl oodgates but this was only a temporary solution, mus-sel farmers say.

The government is also fi ght-ing the EU ban so that exports – more lucrative than domestic sales – can resume.

Albanian restaurants pay €1-2 for a kilo of mussels, but if they are smuggled to nearby Greece they can fetch up to €7 a kilo, said mussel farmer Roland Hysi.

However, as temperatures threaten the mussels trying to survive in the lagoon’s depths, there is little the farmers can do but anxiously keep checking the daily weather forecasts.

Harvests shrink as Albanian mussels suff ocate due to global warmingBy Briseida Mema, AFPButrint, Albania

Violet Mihasi, 50, collects mussels on a floating platform in a mussel farm in Butrint Lake, south Albania.

Climberskilled in Swiss Alps

AFPGeneva

Two German mountaineers have fallen to their deaths while climbing one of the

highest peaks in the Swiss Alps, the Dent Blanche, police said.

A rescue helicopter was sent after police were alerted by other climbers but offi cers could “only note the death of the two men”, police from the southwest can-ton of Valais said in a statement.

“For now, the circumstances of the accident are still unde-termined. An investigation has been opened by the public pros-ecutor’s offi ce,” the statement said yesterday.

The two climbers fell between a rocky point called “the grande gendarme” and the summit, which rises to 4,357m (14,294’).

Formal identifi cation of the victims is in progress, offi cers said.

EUROPE

Gulf Times Monday, August 5, 201912

Russia’s anti-Kremlin op-position said it was plan-ning a nationwide protest

next weekend despite police for-cibly detaining more than 1,000 people on Saturday for attend-ing what they said was an illegal march in Moscow to demand free elections.

Saturday’s protest, conceived by opposition activists as a peaceful walk to protest against the exclusion of their candidates from a Moscow election next month, was systematically and sometimes violently dispersed by police.

OVD-Info, an independent monitoring group, said yester-

day that police had detained 1,001 people on Saturday, up from its earlier estimate of just more than 800 people.

Many but not all of those de-tained were later released by po-lice, but OVD-Info said 19 were kept in custody overnight.

It said some of those detained had their phones confi scated and had been denied access to a lawyer.

Russian investigators had initiated a criminal case against one man, accusing him of injur-ing a police offi cer, the Tass news agency reported.

Faced with a wave of sum-mer protests, authorities have opened criminal proceedings for what they term mass civil un-rest, an off ence punishable with up to 15 years in jail.

Although they have rejected protesters’ complaints, they have said they’ll allow protests in Moscow on Saturday and Sunday next weekend, albeit in a location away from the city centre which the opposition has rejected in the past.

However, Leonid Volkov, an ally of jailed anti-Kremlin oppo-sition politician Alexei Navalny, said late on Saturday that Naval-ny’s political movement planned to organise another of its own protests on August 10, which he said would be nationwide.

He said protesters would de-mand that jailed activists be released, that opposition can-didates be allow to run in the Moscow election, and that the mayor of Moscow and other top offi cials resign.

“This is a matter of hu-man dignity, about the right to choose and express your opin-ion,” Volkov wrote on Twit-ter. “Muscovites have had their elections stolen, are being ar-rested by the thousand, hun-dreds are being beaten, and doz-ens jailed. Therefore we’ll have to prove our existence on the streets of our cities.”

He said the opposition did not plan to ask Moscow offi cials for permission to protest but would do so in other cities.

Activists say that the Rus-sian constitution allows them to freely protest.

However, authorities say they need to agree the timing and lo-cation in advance, something that was not done ahead of Sat-urday’s protest.

The focus of protesters’ anger is a prohibition on a number of opposition-minded candidates, some of whom are allies of Na-valny, from taking part in a Sep-tember election for Moscow’s city legislature.

That vote, though local, is seen as a dry run for a national parliamentary election due in 2021.

Authorities say opposition candidates failed to collect enough genuine signatures to register and say the election will be competitive.

The excluded candidates say that is a lie and insist on taking part in a contest they believe they could win.

Navalny and at least seven of his allies are currently in jail for breaking protest laws.

The ruling United Russia party dominates the national parliament and Navalny and his allies are starved of media air-time.

President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin have not com-mented on the stand-off with the opposition, but Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, a Putin ally, has condemned the protests as cynically orchestrated mass disorder.

At well over 60%, Putin’s ap-proval rating is still high com-pared with many other world leaders, but is lower than it used to be due to discontent over years of falling incomes.

Last year the 66-year-old former KGB intelligence offi cer won a landslide re-election and a new six-year term until 2024.

Russian opposition plans new rally despite arrestsReutersMoscow

Weekendactivities

Revellers watch a laser show late on Saturday during the Nature One techno music festival on the former US military base Pydna in Kastellaun, western Germany.

Dancers in a traditional outfits take part yesterday in the street parade of the 49th Lorient Interceltic festival (FIL) in Lorient, western France. The 10-day Inter-Celtic festival of Lorient attracts participants from the entire Celtic diaspora.

Activists gesture after putting up a banner on a building on the grounds of the Nato Communications and Information Agency and the Dutch research organisation TNO in The Hague, accusing the organisations of militarising European borders.

Two ‘heavy metal newcomers’ wait for the appearance of the US band Anthrax, at the Wacken Open Air 2019 heavy metal festival, in Wacken, Germany.

France, Germany condemn Moscow protest crackdown

AFPParis

France and Germany have condemned a Russian police crackdown on a

banned opposition rally that saw hundreds detained, with Paris criticising an “excessive use of force” after a second weekend of protests over the exclusion of opposition candidates from local Moscow polls next month.

Berlin said the police action on Saturday “violated” Russia’s in-ternational obligations and un-dermines the right to fair elec-tions in the country.

The arrests on Saturday were “out of all proportion to the peaceful nature of the protests against the exclusion of inde-pendent candidates” from city elections in Moscow, the Ger-man government said.

Crowds had walked along the capital’s central boulevard in a protest “stroll” over the refusal by offi cials to let opposition can-didates run in September polls for city parliament seats – a local issue that has turned into a po-litical crisis.

Police say that 1,500 people took part in the demonstration.

AFP observed dozens of ar-rests along the route, as police formed human chains and ap-pearing to grab people indis-criminately.

An ally of detained opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Lyubov Sobol, who is currently three weeks into a hunger strike after being barred from taking part in the election, was dragged from a taxi and detained as she set off for the rally.

Hours later she was taken to court where she was fi ned 300,000 roubles ($4,600) for a gathering on July 15, and held for further questioning over the protest last weekend, her team said.

A French foreign ministry spokesman said in a statement that Paris “insists on freedom of expression in all its forms, including that of demonstrating peacefully and taking part in free and transparent elections”.

France “calls on Russia to im-mediately free the people in-carcerated in recent days and to conform to its commitments as a member of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the Council of Europe”, the ministry state-ment said.

Berlin condemned “the re-peated interference in the guar-anteed right to peaceful assem-bly and freedom of expression” which “violates Russia’s inter-national obligations and strong-ly questions the right to free and fair elections”.

Yesterday’s statements from Berlin and Paris follow an appeal last Monday calling on Moscow to release 1,400 other protesters detained after a similar demon-stration on July 27.

Forty migrants aboard a Ger-man NGO rescue ship arrived in Malta yesterday after Italy

refused to let them land and a dis-tribution agreement was made be-tween several EU countries.

The Alan Kurdi ship, run by charity Sea-Eye, had rescued the migrants off the Libyan coast on Wednesday but Italy’s far-right In-terior Minister Matteo Salvini de-nied the boat the right to use Italian ports.

The boat instead travelled to Malta.

Under the distribution deal, none of the migrants will remain in the country.

“They all nearly died. Now they are celebrating life. May they fi nd open arms and hearts in their new home,” Sea-Eye wrote in a tweet late on Saturday.

It described the mission as “suc-cessful” and said the migrants had been entrusted to the Maltese army.

While emphasising that none of the migrants would remain in Mal-ta, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat described his country’s actions as “a sign of goodwill”.

He said Malta felt it was a “hu-manitarian issue” after Germany requested it allow the rescue boat to dock.

The German government and the European Commission made ar-rangements for the migrants to be shared among several EU countries, the Maltese government said.

The Alan Kurdi – named after a Syrian toddler who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea – stayed in in-ternational waters as the migrants disembarked.

The government gave no indica-tion which countries had agreed to take them in.

But Portugal said on Saturday that it was prepared to accept fi ve of those on board, and that France, Germany and Luxembourg had of-fered to take others.

On Thursday, Salvini said that the German government had told the European Commission that un-

less the 40 migrants onboard the Alan Kurdi were allowed to disem-bark in Italy it would not take in a group of 30 migrants it had already promised to accept.

“This is real blackmail,” said Sal-vini. “It confi rms that other Eu-ropean countries consider Italy as their refugee camp, but things have changed and we no longer accept orders and invasions.”

During its last rotation off Libya in early July, the Alan Kurdi rescued 109 migrants and disembarked them in Malta.

Meanwhile another humanitar-ian ship, Open Arms, was looking for a port to disembark 121 mi-grants.

The Spanish NGO Proactiva Open Arms had rescued 55 mi-grants off Libya on Thursday, and then took on a second group of 69 the next day.

Two pregnant women and the sister of one of them were allowed to disembark in Italy for medical reasons, while the others remain on board the ship, which is barred from entering Italian territorial waters.

Migrants on German NGO ship allowed to disembark in MaltaAFPValletta

Migrants get ready to disembark from a Maltese patrol boat, after they were transferred from the rescue vessel Alan Kurdi, at the maritime base in Pieta.

Petition ondomestic violence law gains 650,000 signatures

AFPMoscow

More than 650,000 peo-ple have signed a peti-tion calling on Russian

authorities to toughen domestic violence legislation thanks to a social media campaign on the issue.

The petition was created some time ago but only gathered steam last week after Russian female bloggers and women’s rights campaigners threw their weight behind it with a hard-hitting online campaign.

The women posted photos of themselves with make-up sug-gesting cuts and bruises, along with the slogan: “I did not want to die.”

The aim was to help boost a petition fi rst launched by lead-ing women’s rights fi gure Aliona Popova, urging Russia to adopt a law protecting victims of do-mestic violence, which mainly aff ects women.

Russia’s legal system eff ec-tively leaves women without any state protection for abuse in the home.

The issue is rarely discussed publicly and campaigners say police often ignore cases.

“In Russia, almost 16mn women are victims of domestic violence every year,” Popova said at a press conference last week, hailing the online campaign for helping to garner more than 650,000 signatures.

There is no separate law cov-ering domestic violence in cases where the victim is living with the attacker, but rather it is in-cluded under the off ence of bat-tery.

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree watering down the punishment of abuse in families in 2017, making a fi rst off ence punishable by only a fi ne instead of a jail sentence.

In July, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that Russian authorities were “reluc-tant to recognise the seriousness of the problem”.

It said authorities failed to put in place measures that would protect victims from abuse in the home.

“One out of three women in Russia is beaten by their hus-band or partner. Every 45 min-utes, a woman is killed at home – these numbers are terrifying,” Olga Kravtsova, a blogger with a large following on social media, wrote on Instagram earlier this month.

In May, a case against three teenage sisters who killed their father after years of alleged beat-ings and sexual abuse sparked protests and highlighted Rus-sia’s dire record on domestic violence.

INDIA13Gulf Times

Monday, August 5, 2019

Earth as viewed by Chandrayaan-2’s LI4 camera.

Senior offi cialsshifted overkilling of 10tribal farmersIANSLucknow

Uttar Pradesh Chief Min-ister Yogi Adityanath yesterday transferred

Sonebhadra’s district magistrate and superintendent of police and ordered an inquiry against them after 10 tribal farmers were killed over a land dispute on July 17.

S Ramlingam has been posted as the new district magistrate, replacing Ankit Agarwal, while Prabhakar Chaudhary will be the new superintendent of police in place of Salman Taj Patil.

Addressing a press conference here, the chief minister said the action was being taken on the basis of a report submitted by an inquiry committee, headed by Additional Chief Secretary Renuka Kumar.

Adityanath said since the dispute began in 1955 when the land was given to Adarsh Society formed by Congress leaders, the government had decided to lodge an FIR against the then revenue offi cials, if they were still alive.

The 1,000 page report, ac-cording to sources, names several revenue offi cials over the years who either turned a blind eye to the simmering land dispute or allowed the land to change hands in violation of the rules.

The report suggested action against 13 revenue offi cials.

The panel had a specific brief to investigate how land in the three villages of Ubha, Sapai and Murtiya in the Sonebhadra was transferred to a society and then taken over by the village head.

Meanwhile, in more trouble for former Uttar Pradesh min-ing minister Gayatri Prajapati, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) yesterday said it has regis-tered a case of money launder-ing against him, five IAS offic-ers and others for illegal sand mining in Deoria and Fatehpur districts.

A senior ED offi cial in Delhi told IANS: “The agency has reg-

istered a case of money launder-ing against Prajapati, then prin-cipal secretary Jiwesh Nandan, special secretary Santosh Kumar, then district magistrates Abhay Kumar Singh and Vivek and un-known others.”

The ED had on July 16 ques-tioned Prajapati in Lucknow’s King George’s Medical College for three hours.

Prajapati, who is in judicial custody in an alleged gang rape case, was recently shifted to the hospital after he complained of being unwell.

The ED has questioned Pra-japati about his role in giving three sand mining licences to Shiv Singh and Sukhraj in Fateh-pur district.

The offi cial said the agency suspects that the money gener-ated from Shiv Singh and Sukhraj was used to buy properties in cit-ies like Lucknow, Rae Bareli and Amethi.

The agency also plans to ques-tion Prajapati’s sons Anil and Anurag to identify the money trail.

The Central Bureau of Inves-tigation last month searched Bulandshahr District Magistrate Abhay Kumar Singh’s and former Deoria District Magistrate Vivek’s premises among others.

Abhay Kumar Singh was ear-lier the District Magistrate of Fatehpur while Vivek is presently the Director of Training and Em-ployment in Lucknow.

During the searches, the CBI seized Rs47 lakh in cash from Abhay Kumar Singh’s residence while Rs10 lakh was found from the premises of Devi Sharan Upadhyay, a former Additional District Magistrate of Deoria, now posted as CDO, Azamgarh.

The development can spell trouble for former chief minister Akhilesh Yadav since he has been linked to illegal mining.

Abhay Kumar Singh has been under the CBI scanner for alleged irregularities in mining when he was the District Magistrate of Fatehpur and Yadav was the chief minister (2012-17).

Kashmir parties call forsafeguarding autonomyIANSSrinagar

Amid turmoil and un-certainty in Jammu and Kashmir, all parties in the

state yesterday decided to re-main together and stand united in their struggle for safeguard-ing the state’s “identity, auton-omy and special status”.

The all-party meeting, pre-sided by National Conference chairman Farooq Abdullah in presence of People’s Demo-cratic Party chief and former chief minister Mehbooba Muf-ti, decided that “modification and abrogation of Articles 35A and 370, unconstitutional de-limitation or trifurcation of the state would be an aggression against the people of Jammu,

Kashmir and Ladakh” and they will fight against it.

Leaders from the PDP, the National Conference, the Con-gress, and the Peoples’ Move-ment led by Shah Faesal were present at the all-party meet-ing.

The meeting comes amid a tense situation triggered by massive deployment of secu-rity forces, cancellation of the Amarnath Yatra pilgrimage, and forced removal of tourists and others from the Kashmir Valley over fears of terror attacks. The call also comes amid concerns the increased security is part of the central government’s plan to deal with the fallout of with-drawing the state’s special sta-tus.

In New Delhi, Home Minister Amit Shah on Sunday presided

over a high-level security meet-ing.

The meeting was attended by National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, Home Secretary Ra-jiv Gauba, Intelligence Bureau chief Arvind Kumar, Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) chief Samant Kumar Goel and senior Home Ministry offi cials.

Additional Secretary (Jammu and Kashmir Division) Gyanesh Kumar separately briefed the Shah about the situation in the Valley.

Sources said the minister dis-cussed the internal security as well as the situation in Kashmir.

Also yesterday, the Kashmir unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) asked people not to believe rumours as the top leadership of the party would not take any decision that

would not be pro-people as far as Jammu and Kashmir was concerned.

State BJP leader Altaf Thakur said that local political par-ties were trying to spread panic among the people to remain relevant after they had lost all the support of the people at the ground level in the state.

“The leaders of these parties are neck-deep in corruption and in order to shift public focus from their misdeeds, they are posing to be the champions of the people of Kashmir.

“The frustration of such ele-ments shows clearly from their statements and speeches,” Thakur said.

He added that the fear psy-chosis is actually aff ecting them, and not the people.

In Patna, Loktantrik Janata

Dal (LJD) chief Sharad Yadav warned the government against playing with Articles 370 and 35A as it was not good for the country’s unity.

Insisting that the government was deploying additional secu-rity forces in the state to present an artifi cial threat, Yadav said: “The central government’s move to play with Articles 370 and 35A in J&K is dangerous, it is not good for the country.”

The veteran socialist leader said Articles 370 and 35A were part of the promises made to the state “by our leaders who fought for the country’s independ-ence.”

“But the government is doing everything to threaten the unity of the country, without listening to the genuine grievances of the people of J&K,” he said.

ISRO releases fi rst set of earthphotos sent by Chandrayaan-2IANSNew Delhi/Chennai

T he Indian Space Re-search Organisation (ISRO) yesterday took

to Twitter to share the first pictures of Earth captured by the LI4 camera installed in Chandrayaan-2.

The space agency also said Prime Minister Narendra Modi will watch the moon landing of the lander Vikram carried by Chandrayaan-2.

Two students studying in classes 8 to 10 from each state scoring the highest in a quiz contest organised by ISRO in co-ordination with MyGov.in too can watch Vikram’s landing along with Modi at the space agency’s Bengaluru centre, it said.

The Vikram is expected to

land on the moon on Septem-ber 7.

The online quiz to be held be-tween August 10 and 20 is for students to create awareness about space programmes, ISRO said.

Participants for the contest have to create an account on www.MyGov.in.

The contest is open only to Indian citizens.

The criteria for selection of winners will be the maximum correct answers in the shortest time.

The quiz duration will be five minutes and the number of questions will be 20.

Meanwhile on Friday, the fourth orbit raising activity for

the spacecraft was performed successfully at 3.27pm, the ISRO said.

The orbit was raised to 277x89,472km by firing the on-board motors for 646 seconds, it said, adding that all space-craft parameters were normal.

The fifth orbit raising ma-noeuvre is scheduled between 2.30pm and 3.30pm on August 6.

The Chandrayaan-2 was in-jected into an elliptical orbit on July 22 the by India’s heavy lift rocket Geosynchronous Satel-lite Launch Vehicle-Mark III (GSLV Mk III) in a text book style.

The spacecraft comprises three segments - the orbiter (weighing 2,379kg, eight pay-loads), the lander Vikram (1,471kg, four payloads) and rover Pragyan (27kg, two pay-loads).

Residents stand in a queue at a petrol station in Srinagar yesterday.

Will quit AAP, fi ght polls as independent: Lamba

IANSNew Delhi

Aam Aadmi Party’s Delhi MLA Alka Lamba yes-terday announced that

she will resign from the party and contest the next assem-bly election as an independent candidate.

Lamba, who has has diff er-ences with the party on vari-ous issues, said she took the decision after consulting the people of her Chandni Chowk constituency.

In a tweet in Hindi, she said the people from her constitu-ency have agreed that instead of compromising with her self-respect, she should resign from the party and that she should contest the next election as an independent candidate.

Challenging the party and its chief Arvind Kejriwal, Lamba

said: “If you have guts, then sack me from the party. I know you will never do this as you are scared of the people. I will con-tinue to be the MLA, as I don’t want people and development work to suff er.”

Responding to Lamba’s an-nouncement, AAP spokesper-son Saurabh Bhardwaj said: “She has announced this a dozen of times in the past. It takes only a minute to send a written resignation letter to the party leadership. We will accept it on Twitter too.”

The first major flare-up between Lamba and the AAP surfaced in December 2018 when she went against the party over an alleged resolu-tion to revoke former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s Bharat Ratna award. Since then she has accused the par-ty of partiality and misbehav-iour on several occasions.

How Rajasthan tribals suff er under traffi cking tyrannyIANSJaipur

Last month, Bharatiya Tribal Party (BTP) legisalator Raju Kumar Raot stunned the

Rajasthan assembly by stating that 60 children in the age group of 8-16, who had been reported “missing”, had actually been “rented” out by their poverty-ridden parents to work as labour-ers and domestic helps in states like Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra.

According to Raot, the tribal region of Vagad as well as villag-es in Banswara, Dungarpur and

Pratapgarh districts - all domi-nated by the poorest of the poor Bhils and other such tribes - are battling massive child traffi cking for the past few years.

Raot’s statement has started a new debate on the changing dynamics of human traffick-ing in Rajasthan. If tribal par-ents renting their children for money out of desperation is one aspect, the other is the kidnap-ping of young girls and boys from tribal regions and their selling in neighbouring Gujarat for sex or slavery.

And this is a thriving trade in Bhamati, a poverty-ridden tribal halmet in Jadol tehsil of Udaipur.

The people involved in the racket are repeatedly arrested and re-leased on bail and therefore, the cycle of crime never ends. And the victims, mostly, never return.

“Parents who have money are successful in getting their chil-dren back,” said former village head Shantilal Karadi.

One such lucky father is Sura-jmal Pargi, whose 16-year-old daughter was abducted while she was on her way to her sister’s vil-lage and then sold for Rs2 lakh by fi ve people. She was recovered from Jalore after a four-month-long search.

“We have arrested fi ve people and registered a case under Sec-

tion 370 (fl esh trade),” said police offi cer Ummedilal Meena.

“I was lucky to get my daugh-ter back after spending a heavy amount. But what about those who are poor and cannot aff ord to hire cabs and go around searching for their children?” asked Pargi.

Phalasiya village resident Nathulal’s daughter was taken to Pali on the pretext of work. “Then the traffi ckers posing as her parents tried to sell her to an-other family. However, the family got suspicious and got a case reg-istered against her real parents in Pali,” said Nathulal.

Since then Nathulal and his wife have been making rounds

of the court in Pali for hearings with little or no money at their hands.

Pargi said there were many such missing girls whose where-abouts were not known. “The agents shut the mouths of their poor parents by giving them some money, and they never go to the police to get a case regis-tered. Sometimes these girls get in touch with their families after years when they have 3-4 chil-dren as a result of the physical torture meted out to them,” he said.

Babu Devi, 39, was kidnapped from Bhamati and taken to Sri Ganganagar. “The kidnappers

were trying to fi x me with some-one when I escaped, reached a railway station and boarded a train to Jaipur. From Jaipur, I took a bus to Jadol. My husband is too poor and illiterate to have got a complaint registered. However, I reached home on my own, hun-gry and thirsty, after several days of travel,” she said.

Not just girls, young boys too are taken to Gujarat on the pre-text of work and then not allowed to return home. They are kept as bonded labour. Kardi shared with IANS a list of names - of four girls who have gone missing and 17 boys who have been taken away for work in the past few

months from the neighbouring villages.

Mahaveer Meena, 17, was taken from his village in Jadol to Kher-wada village in Gujarat to work as a labourer. “After eight days, I wanted to visit my family, but was not allowed to. Neither was I paid my salary. On the 10th day, I ran away and reached my vil-lage. There were 15 other boys like me. I informed their families as well. All of them hired a cab and went to Kherwada and se-cretly brought back those boys. The driver had some connection and helped us reach our village safely,” he said, adding that now he is studying for BCom.

The Vikram is expected to land on the moon on September 7

14 Gulf TimesMonday, August 5, 2019

INDIA

IAS man in accident rowadmitted in govt hospital

IANSThiruvananthapuram

An IAS offi cer, charged with killing a young journalist in a road ac-

cident, was yesterday shifted from a luxury private hospital here to the district jail but after two hours at its gate, was sent to the Medical College hospital’s ‘prison cell’.

The developments came amid outrage over Kerala police’s han-dling of the case.

Returning from a late-night party, IAS offi cer Sreeram Venk-itaraman, who was allegedly drunk, knocked down K M Bash-eer, a journalist with a Malay-alam daily, with his car early on Saturday. Venkitraman was ac-companied by his woman friend Waha Firoz.

Venkitaraman was, however, allowed to get admitted to a lux-ury room at the KIMS hospital on Saturday morning.

With the media pursuing this

case and highlighting the po-lice’s lapses, including delay in taking Venkitaraman’s blood sample, police arrested the IAS offi cer.

He was then taken in an am-bulance to the local magistrate, who asked the police to send him to judicial custody.

The ambulance then took him to the jail but stayed at its en-trance for two hours.

He was then shifted to the prison cell at the Medical Col-lege hospital.

The officer was sent to jail after Kerala Union of Work-ing Journalists’ Thiruvanan-thapuram president Suresh Vellimanagalem said if Venkitaraman was not moved out from KIMS hospital, the journalist fraternity will be-gin a protest before the hos-pital.

Congress leader Ramesh Chennithala also demanded that a medical bulletin on the con-dition of Venkitaraman be re-leased.

Bike ambulances helped 650patients since Feb: AAP govtIANSNew Delhi

‘Bike ambulances’ running in the narrow lanes of east Delhi have helped over 650 patients

since February, data provided by the Aam Aadmi Party govern-ment claims.

The Delhi government also says that the 16 bike ambulances act as the fi rst responder vehi-cles for patients.

“The bikes were launched in February with an aim to ensure timely health assistance in traf-fi c-congested areas and small lanes in east Delhi. Currently, 16 bikes are running and have helped over 650 patients since February. On average, we receive about 20 calls a day on 102 – the helpline number,” a health offi -cial said.

Ranging from assistance in high or low sugar and blood pressure to fractures, the fi rst responder vehicles have proved quite help-

ful in serving the area, the offi cial said adding the bikes help in pre-venting the loss of limbs or life by providing basic fi rst aid and stabi-lise the patient till the arrival of a regular ambulance.

“We are planning to expand the scheme in the other parts of the city as we are getting a posi-tive response in east Delhi,” the offi cial said.

Traffi c congestion, however, remains a challenge for the bikes, “but they reach on the spot ear-lier than the van ambulances”.

“After receiving a call on 102, we send both the bike and van. By the time the van reaches, the bike had provided the basic as-sistance. Also, there are areas in east Delhi where a van cannot go, so the bike helps the patients in coming to the main road or to the hospital depending on the situa-tion.” All the 16 motorcycles have a portable oxygen cylinder, fi rst aid kit and dressing materials, air-splints, GPS and communi-cation device, foldable transfer

sheet, Glucometer, pulse oxime-ter and portable manual suction machine among others.

While rolling out the project, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and Health Minister Satyendar Jain said the bikes will help in reducing the ambulance response time in congested areas in east Delhi.

“Till now only big vehicles were available for ambulance services, now these bike am-bulances will be able to reach narrow bylanes to provide im-mediate medical care for people residing there,” Kejriwal said.

“For the operational purpose, these bikes are also equipped with Mobile Data Terminal (MDT) for communication, GPS devices for tracking and route navigation and integrated with existing CATS Control Room. These bike ambulances are manned by trained ambulance manpower.”

The project was completed at a cost of Rs23 lakh.

CBI searches 17 places inprobe intoUnnao caseIANSLucknow/New Delhi

A day after the Central Bureau of Investiga-tion questioned expelled

Bharatiya Janata Party legislator Kuldeep Singh Sengar in the Un-nao rape case, the federal agency yesterday searched at least 17 places in four districts in Uttar Pradesh, including the residenc-es of Sengar.

A senior CBI offi cial in Delhi told IANS that the searches were carried out in Lucknow, Un-nao, Banda and Fatehpur. The residential premises of Sengar in Lucknow’s upscale Gomti Nagar was also searched.

A CBI team on Saturday ques-tioned Sengar in Sitapur jail, where he has been lodged for over a year. According to CBI sources in Lucknow, the agen-cy also collected details of the people the former legislator has been meeting in the prison.

Following the outrage over the July 28 road accident that has left the Unnao rape victim and her lawyer battling for life and killed two of her family mem-bers, the BJP expelled Sengar.

The girl, meanwhile, is still critical and on ventilator. Doc-tors said she had developed pneumonia and could not be re-moved from the ventilator ‘even on a trial basis’.

Senior CBI offi cers yesterday also questioned the owner and cleaner of the truck that hit the car in which the victim and oth-ers were travelling.

The CBI is focusing on the statement of D K Pal, the truck owner, that the number plates were blackened to escape seizure by the company that fi nanced

the vehicle. His statement was contradicted by the fi nance company which said all instal-ments had been paid on time.

Before appearing before the CBI offi cers in Lucknow, Pal said there was no conspiracy in the road accident as he was not in contact with anyone, including Sengar.

He said the driver had been working for him for last fi ve months, while the cleaner was employed for over three years.

Ashish Pal, the driver, mean-while has told the CBI that the truck skidded due to heavy rain on the day of the accident.

Pal said he was returning after offl oading ‘maurang’ (mortar) in Rae Bareli when he saw a car coming from the opposite direc-tion. He said he was driving at a

speed of about 50 to 55kmph.He said he applied the brakes

but amid the heavy downpour the truck skidded and while the front portion of the truck turned left, the rear portion turned right and hit the car.

He also insisted that he had no connection with Unnao and did not know anyone there.

Pal told the CBI that he does not take alcohol, but chews to-bacco. He said he has been driv-ing the truck for the past four years and belonged to Fatehpur district. The case relates to the rape of the girl allegedly by Sen-gar at his residence in Unnao on June 4, 2017 when she had gone to seek a job.

The Supreme Court last week ordered transfer of all cases re-lating to the rape to Delhi.

The newly launched bike ambulance services ensure timely health assistance in traffic-congested areas and small lanes.

Commuters hitch a ride on a garbage truck as it makes its way on a flooded road after heavy monsoon rains in Mumbai yesterday.

No letup in Mumbai rains;IAF, NDRF rescue villagersIANSMumbai

At least fi ve people were killed in Mumbai and Satara as rains continued

to batter large parts of Mahar-ashtra yesterday, hitting train services hit badly.

Helicopters rescued 73 peo-ple in Thane and boats were deployed to rescue around 400 people stranded in Mumbai suburbs, offi cials said.

In the state capital, a woman and her son were killed due to electrocution in Santacruz east and a man was washed away in Dharavi while two men from Pune drowned in a waterfall in Satara after their vehicle hit a barricade and fell into a fl ooded drain at Babhalnala early yes-terday.

Following incessant over-night rains, water seeped into many homes in Kranti Na-gar, Indira Nagar, Jarimari, Shankarnagar and Bail-bazar areas of Kurla suburb and two teams of the National Disaster Relief Front (NDRF) deployed rubber boats to rescue around 400 residents stranded there.

“They have been temporarily shifted to Bazarwad Municipal

School and other schools. Con-gress activists have also made arrangements for food, water and medical help as required,” local legislator and Congress deputy leader in assembly Na-seem Khan said.

The Indian Air Force deployed an MI-17 helicopter to rescue 58 villagers, including 18 children, from Ju village in neighbouring Thane as they were stranded in rising fl ood waters.

In another operation, 15 ma-rooned villagers were saved by an MI-17 helicopter in Buranda village of Palghar yesterday evening.

The operations were con-ducted after a request by the Maharashtra government, and all the stranded people were shifted to safer locations at the Air Force Station in Thane, and another location in Palghar, said an offi cial.

In Church Road-Dahanukar-wadi areas of Kandivali, some locals made temporary rafts of wooden boards to ferry people to nearby areas for replenishing stocks of essentials.

In some villages in Pen of Raigad district, around 60 peo-ple who were stuck in 6ft-deep water since 4am were rescued by NDRF teams in boats.

Similarly 40 were saved from the marooned Mori village in Palghar.

Most schools and college in Thane, Ratnagiri and Pune have declared a holiday today in view of continuing rains.

The Western Railway (WR) services between Vasai and Vi-rar were suspended for several hours as the tracks were fl ood-ed. The services resumed after 2.30pm.

The Central Railway (CR) services were hit in some sec-tors like Kurla-Sion due to wa-terlogging on tracks, breaches in railway lines, and landslides, while its suburban Harbour Line was paralysed.

Thousands of passengers were stranded at various sta-tions in Mumbai, Thane and Palghar as train services were disrupted, while hundreds more were stuck in incoming trains that were halted at vari-ous locations en route.

Similar chaos was witnessed on the Konkan Railway with trains getting delayed, incon-veniencing thousands of pas-sengers.

Mumbai experienced 4.86m-high tides and the combined eff ect of the existing waterlog-ging and continuing rains led to

homes in many parts of the sub-urbs experiencing fresh fl ooding.

A portion of a bridge on Pin-jal River in Palghar was washed away yesterday morning, bringing traffi c to a complete halt on both sides.

For the second consecutive day, waterlogging was reported in many areas of Nala Sopara, Vasai, Virar, Vikramgad (Pal-ghar district), Mira Road, Bhay-ander, Thane City, Bhiwandi, Kalyan, Titwala, Ulhasnagar (Thane), Roha, Pali, Mangaon, Karjat, Pen, Panvel (Raigad), and Mandangad, Chiplun, and Dapoli (Ratnagiri).

In Mumbai several vulner-able spots in Dahisar, Borivali, Kandivali, Andheri, Santacruz, Khar, Bandra, Matunga, Par-el, Dadar, Kings Circle, Sion, Vikhroli, Ghatkopar, Kurla, Bhandup, Mulund and other parts were fl ooded. However, there were no traffi c snarls since it was a holiday.

Subways in Kandivali, Mal-ad, and Andheri were fl ooded, hampering traffi c in the east-west directions.

However, most fl ights were operating at Chhatrapati Shiv-aji Maharaj International Air-port with delays of around 30 minutes, offi cials said.

Google bets big with several ‘India fi rst’ featuresIANSNew Delhi

From alerting Google Maps users when their vehicle goes off -route to partner-

ing with the Ministry of Housing and Urban Aff airs for the “Loo Review” campaign, the bull-ish search engine giant has had a history of building India-fi rst features for the world’s second-largest population.

India also has the second-big-gest digital market and the Inter-net population of over 500mn is expected to touch 650mn by 2020.

Especially targeted at the ver-nacular audience, in 2014 Google introduced “Voice Search” in the country, which let users speak in Hindi to navigate the web.

Google’s virtual assistant – Google Assistant – can now read web content in 28 regional lan-guages including Hindi, Bengali, Malayalam, Marathi and Tamil.

“By focusing on voice and ver-nacular, Google is innovating for a new generation of mobile-fi rst, and mobile-only Internet users, connecting the unconnected, and enabling them to access and experience, Google’s suite of products and platforms,” Pra-bhu Ram of Industry Intelligence Group (IIG), CMR, told IANS.

One of Google’s most popular India-fi rst features introduced on Maps in June 2019 is called “Stay Safer” which has been

designed to give people travel-ling in taxis and auto-rickshaws peace of mind, or avoid being taken through a longer route.

As part of the feature, if the user’s driver deviates more than 0.5km from the Google Maps’ suggested route, the user’s phone would buzz with a promi-nent notifi cation, and they can tap it to see where they are com-pared to the original route.

“Innovating for India’s dig-ital surge provides Google with

opportunities to experiment, iterate, fail-fast, as well as scale successful made-in-India solu-tions globally,” noted Ram.

In partnership with the Min-istry of Housing and Urban Af-fairs, Google launched “Loo Review” campaign in Septem-ber 2018 to encourage all local guides in India to rate and review public toilets on Google Maps.

This is part of a feature which allows all citizens to locate public toilets in their cities on

Google Maps, Search and Google Assistant and also provide feed-back. Google Maps currently has more than 45,000 community and public toilets as part of the campaign.

The company made instant bank-to-bank transfers via Uni-fi ed Payments Interface (UPI) available with Tez in 2017. It was later rebranded as Google Pay in August 2018. Google Pay has over 25mn monthly active users (MAUs) in India.

Earlier in July, Google Maps added three new features for In-dian users to help them discover local experiences and get recom-mendations that are personal-ised for better dining experience, including an “Off ers” section to help them fi nd deals and claim them at restaurants in 11 cities.

The feature was rolled out in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune, Chennai, Kolkata, Goa, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Chandigarh and Hyderabad.

The driver and cleaner of the truck that hit the car in which the Unnao rape victim was travelling, being taken to a court in Lucknow.

LATIN AMERICA15Gulf Times

Monday, August 5, 2019

Maduro bid to oust Citgoboard suff ers setbackReutersHouston

The board of Citgo Petro-leum appointed by Ven-ezuela’s congress chief

was properly seated, a US court ruled, dealing a blow to Venezue-lan President Nicolas Maduro’s eff orts to retake control of the Texas-based refi ner.

Venezuelan congress chief Juan Guaido’s recognition by the Trump administration as the South American country’s le-gitimate leader makes his Citgo appointments valid, Delaware Chancery Court vice chancellor Kathaleen McCormick ruled.

The ruling provides US court backing for Guaido as the coun-try’s offi cial leader with power to name directors of Citgo and its parent, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). However, McCormick delayed the ruling for 10 days to give Maduro’s lawyers time to challenge the process used to

confi rm the appointments.“We are grateful that the court

has rejected the Maduro govern-ment eff orts to use the US judici-ary to advance their anti-demo-cratic objectives,” Citgo said in a statement.

Quinn Smith, an attorney who represents the Maduro-appoint-ed board, said the group is re-viewing the judge’s opinion and considering its next steps.

Neither PDVSA nor the Ven-ezuelan oil ministry immediately responded to requests for comment.

Citgo, Venezuela’s most im-portant foreign asset, has been caught in a tug-of-war as Presi-dent Donald Trump’s govern-ment has tried to use the fi rm as leverage to topple Maduro.

Sanctions have barred Citgo from buying Venezuelan crude or paying it dividends.

Judge McCormick said the court “accepts as binding the US president’s recognition of the Guaido government and as-sumes the validity of the Guaido

government’s appointments to the PDVSA board.” If lawyers for Maduro cannot show the Guaido board was improperly appointed, she could issue an order confi rm-ing its members by August 16.

Her ruling set a high hurdle for Maduro’s lawyers to challenge the directors.

McCormick wrote the court generally accepts director seat-ings, and noted the Maduro board’s lawyers “do not appear to contest the authority” of the offi cials who authorised the ap-pointments. The Maduro-group could challenge the decision.

Smith declined to comment on whether it would pursue an appeal.

In February, the Guaido-led congress appointed an ad-hoc PDVSA board with rights to nominate directors for US units PDV Holding, Citgo Holding and Citgo Petroleum.

However, Maduro retains the support of the Venezuelan mili-tary and still controls PDVSA and most state functions.

Ross to attendPeru summit: USReutersWashington/Lima

US Secretary Wilbur Ross will attend a summit in Peru tomorrow to discuss

the political situation in Vene-zuela, the US commerce depart-ment said.

Ross is visiting Brazil and Ar-gentina this week and two sourc-es in Peru’s foreign ministry said that he will be joined at the con-ference in Peru by US national security adviser John Bolton.

The sources asked not to be named.

A spokesman for Bolton de-clined to comment.

Peru invited some 100 for-eign ministers to the summit and had hoped to include Rus-sia, Cuba, China, Bolivia and Turkey — all allies of Vene-zuelan President Nicolas Ma-duro.

The idea was to foster dia-logue between supporters of Maduro and his critics, and build support for early elec-tions, Peru’s foreign minister

said when he announced the summit last month.

But Russia and Cuba turned down their invitations, the sources said, while China and Bolivia have not confi rmed whether they will attend.

Along with Peru and most Latin American countries, Washington has recognised op-position leader Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s rightful leader.

Maduro has refused to step down and has called the US an imperialist power that wants to control Venezuela’s oil.

The head of the Inter-Amer-ican Development Bank, Luis Moreno, and the European Un-ion’s representative on Ven-ezuela, Enrique Iglesias, have confi rmed they will attend to-morrow’s meeting, the sources said.

Meanwhile the Venezuelan government and the opposition are continuing to hold talks in Barbados in an eff ort to fi nd ways to resolve the Latin American country’s political crisis, the for-eign ministry of mediator Nor-way said.

Bolsonaropledges to fi ght ‘illegal deforestation’AFP/ReutersBrasilia

Brazil’s President Jair Bol-sonaro vowed to combat “illegal deforestation,” a

day after the head of the agency that measures deforestation said he was being sacked after a row over the scale of the problem in the Amazon rainforest.

“We are going to act eff ectively in the fi ght against illegal defor-estation,” Bolsonaro wrote on his Facebook account, along with a video in which Environment Minister Ricardo Salles said the government would bring in new technology to measure deforest-ation with greater precision.

Earlier, the head of Brazil’s National Institute for Space Re-search (INPE), Ricardo Galvao, said he was being sacked after a row with Bolsonaro over defor-estation.

Bolsonaro, a climate change sceptic, claimed the INPE fi gures “don’t correspond to the truth” and were damaging to the insti-tute and the country.

The president has previously fl oated the idea of opening up protected rainforest areas to ag-riculture, a highly controversial move given the existing level of deforestation.

“We cannot accept sensa-tionalism, or the disclosure of inaccurate numbers that cause great damage to Brazil’s image,” Bolsonaro said, reiterating com-ments from his row over the INPE fi gures.

The latest data released by INPE, an institution of interna-tional repute, shows that defor-estation has increased 40% in the last two months compared to the same period a year ago.

On Thursday, Bolsonaro,

Salles and other ministers had refuted the INPE satellite data and said the methodologies for measuring deforestation would be changed.

The government admits defor-estation has increased but insists it is not as great as indicated by the agency.

Bolsonaro and Salles have tak-en issue with this interpretation of the numbers produced by a system known as DETER, saying they should not be used to meas-ure month-by-month increases but only as indicative data to help enforcement teams target opera-tions against illegal logging and burning in an area three times the size of Western Europe.

The government has said only the consolidated annual data, known as PRODES, should be used to calculate increases in de-forestation.

Galvao agreed the DETER data should not be used to compare one month to the next because it was not perfectly able to dif-ferentiate exactly when defor-estation occurred, but stressed this did not mean deforestation picked up by the system was not happening.

Indeed, the reality was likely worse according to Galvao. “His-torically the DETER numbers are much lower than PRODES,” he said.

Galvao claimed the trend of sharply rising deforestation was undeniable. “There is not the slightest doubt,” he said when asked whether the data pointed to a trend of signifi cantly in-

creasing deforestation. “Our data is absolutely correct.”

The sacking of Galvao fuelled criticism from environmental groups.

Environmentalists have also seen it as a dangerous attack on one of the key pillars of Brazil’s fi ght against climate change — the use of data from satellite imagery to measure and com-bat deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.

The preservation of the Ama-zon, the world’s largest rainfor-est, is regarded as vital in the attempt to curb global warming due to its massive ability to ab-sorb carbon from the air.

“I did not off er my resigna-tion,” Galvao said when asked if he had jumped or been pushed.

“Bolsonaro knows that his government is primarily respon-sible for the current destruction of the Amazon. The dismissal of the director of INPE is noth-ing more than an act of revenge against those who show the truth,” said Marcio Astrini from Greenpeace.

For many years, NGOs defend-ing the environment and the territorial rights of indigenous people have criticised the agri-culture industry and major land owners for constantly trying to expand into virgin lands, includ-ing those protected by law.

Bolsonaro, though, was helped in his election last year by sup-port from the powerful agricul-ture lobby.

The president suff ered a blow on Thursday when the Supreme Court cancelled a decree trans-ferring the right to demarcate in-digenous lands from the National Indian Foundation to the minis-try of agriculture, a bulwark of the agriculture industry’s inter-ests.

President Nicolas Maduro walks next to his wife Cilia Flores as they visit a ferry during a meeting with representatives of the water transport sector in La Guaira, Venezuela.

Mexicoprobes shooting of Honduranmigrant

ReutersMexico City

Mexican President An-dres Manuel Lopez Ob-rador instructed offi -

cials to investigate the killing of a Honduran migrant in the north-ern city of Saltillo to determine the role of offi cials in his death.

The man, who was in Mexico with his eight-year-old daugh-ter, was shot and killed at a train station by a member of a state police unit, Coahuila state offi -cials said.

The killing was the latest in a series of recent incidents near the US-Mexico border that have prompted activists and migrant shelters to condemn a crack-down on migration.

Mexico’s government is trying to tighten its borders under pres-sure from US President Donald Trump, who has threatened to impose tariff s on Mexican goods entering the US if Mexico does not halt a surge in migrants from central America.

“The killing of a Honduran migrant in Saltillo is very unfor-tunate,” Lopez Obrador said at his daily news conference.

Coahuila police have recog-nised their responsibility in the incident, but further checks should be made, he added.

“I have ordered an investigation, because there was a version that maintained that it had to do with migration agents who acted against the migrant,” Lopez Obrador said, without providing details.

The administration did not re-lease further information, he added.

Mexico’s public security min-istry and migration institute said in a joint statement that neither federal police nor migration of-fi cials participated in any opera-tion related to the incident.

The migration institute did not immediately respond to a request for comment following Lopez Obrador’s remarks.

Coahuila state attorney Gen-eral Gerardo Marquez said local police told prosecutors they were investigating four men linked to drug sales and heard gunfi re as they chased two suspects to-wards a train station in Saltillo.

Bolivia’s President Evo Morales speaks during a rally as part of his campaign ahead of the October 20 general elections, in Santa Cruz, Bolivia.

Morales campaigns

About 3,000 people were evacuated in central Mexico after suspected thieves punctured a pipeline and released a massive cloud of gas over the area, off icials said. “To guarantee the security of the inhabitants of the area, we have evacu-ated at least 3,000 people and we are moving them to a temporary hostel,” tweeted Alfredo Del Mazo, governor of Mexico, one of the country’s 32 states. The thieves were believed to have wanted to steal fuel or gas from the Cactus-Guadalajara pipeline, the country’s main gas transport pipeline which also carries fuel. The leak released gas that gushed out with a great speed and created a white cloud above the town of Nextalpan.

Panamanian and Colombian authorities have seized more than 4.5 tonnes of cocaine from a motorboat travelling towards Central America in a joint operation, the Colombian Navy said. The boat, manned by five Colombian nationals, was in the Caribbean Sea near Panama when authorities approached it. “Upon noticing the presence of the Panamanian naval authorities, the five occupants of the motorboat threw more than 90 packages in the sea, and then took flight,” a statement by the Colombian Navy said. Presumptive testing of the substance by Colombian authorities indicated a positive read-ing for cocaine.

A German wanted since 2017 for robbery using explosives was deported from Colombia to his home country, the immigration off ice in Bogota said. The man was caught at a checkpoint on the highway between the cities of Ipiales and Pasto in the south of the country when off icials spotted that the entry stamp in his passport was fake. Later, the suspect, the subject of an Interpol red notice, tried to flee the police station in Pasto. He was then taken to the capital Bogota and deported from there to Germany, the statement said. According to the Colombian immigration off ice, the man had military training in Germany and was a member of a special unit.

Colombia’s production of coca — the plant co-caine is made from — went down slightly in 2018, with the area under cultivation dropping from 171,000 to 169,000 hectares, the United Nations Off ice on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said. An upward tendency that began in 2014 has been reversed, UNODC representative Pierre Lapaque said at a joint press conference with Colombian President Ivan Duque. However, Lapaque added, “Colombia is still at the highest levels of coca cultivation since the historic count began in 2011.” Coca farming is now concentrated in a smaller area, with 62% of the plant grown on 5% of the area under cultivation, according to UNODC.

Environmental activists held a protest against deforestation at La Rural, a key agricultural industry fair in Buenos Aires. President Mauricio Macri and Daniel Pelegrina, the head of Argen-tine Rural Society, opened the fair and were confronted with protesters holding up banners featuring slogans including “Destroying forests is a crime.” Greenpeace and other environmen-talist groups have attempted to draw attention to deforestation in Argentina for the purpose of cattle rearing, particularly in the country’s north. “Plans to increase the (cattle) herds are endangering 10mn hectares of forest,” said Hernan Giardini of Greenpeace.

Gas pipe thieves sparkleak, force evacuation

4.5 tonnes cocaine seizedfrom boat in Caribbean

Fugitive German deported from Colombia

Colombia coca cultivationdrops slightly, says UN

Argentina activists decry deforestation at trade fair

SCARE LAW AND ORDERCRIME DATA PROTEST

“We cannot accept sensationalism, or the disclosure of inaccurate numbers that cause great damage to Brazil’s image”

PAKISTAN

Gulf Times Monday, August 5, 201916

Tensions between India and Pakistan over Kash-mir have the potential

to blow up into a regional cri-sis, and it is the right time for US President Donald Trump to mediate, Prime Minister Imran Khan said yesterday.

His comments come a day af-ter Pakistan accused India of us-ing illegal cluster bombs, killing two civilians and wounding 11, in the disputed Kashmir region.

India denied it had used such weapons.

“President Trump off ered to mediate on Kashmir. This is the time to do so as situation dete-riorates there and along the LOC (line of control) with new ag-gressive actions being taken by Indian occupation forces,” Khan said on Twitter, referring to the heavily militarised de facto bor-der that divides the two parts of Kashmir between India and Pa-kistan. “This has the potential to blow up into a regional crisis.”

India’s foreign aff airs min-istry and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Khan’s remarks.

In July, Trump told report-ers that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had asked him during a meeting in Japan if he would like to be a mediator on Kashmir.

India denied Modi ever asked for any mediation.

India has long rejected any suggestion of third-party in-volvement in tackling Kashmir

and, reacting to Trump’s off er last month, said it would deal with Pakistan only bilaterally.

Trump last week reiterated his off er, saying that he would inter-vene if asked, and “it’s really up to Prime Minister Modi”.

Muslim-majority Kashmir, claimed by both India and Pa-kistan, has long been a bone of contention between the two.

Tensions fl ared after a vehicle laden with explosives rammed into an Indian police convoy on February 14, killing 40 para-military police, and leading to aerial clashes between the two nations.

India accuses Pakistan of

funding armed militants, as well as separatist groups in India’s portion of the region.

Islamabad denies the Indian accusation, saying that it pro-vides only diplomatic and moral support to a separatist move-ment.

Tensions have escalated par-ticularly since Friday, when local Indian offi cials in Kashmir is-sued an alert over possible mili-tant attacks by Pakistan-based groups.

Pakistan has rejected those assertions, but thousands of Indian tourists, pilgrims and workers left the region in panic.

Pakistan on Saturday also

rejected India’s claims that it had killed at least fi ve Pakistan-based militants who tried to at-tack its forces near the border.

Yesterday, Kashmir remained on high alert with Indian para-military forces deployed across major towns.

One senior local offi cial said a curfew was likely next week.

However, the city police chief in Srinagar, the state’s main city, told Reuters that he had no knowledge of a curfew.

Hospitals were on alert, with staff told not to leave the city without permission, offi cials said.

The local government said on

Friday it had intelligence about militant attacks and called off a major Hindu pilgrimage, asking pilgrims and tourists to return home.

Kashmir touts itself as a “Paradise on Earth”, with its Dal Lake, famous houseboats and mountains among major attrac-tions.

Britain and Germany have in advisories discouraged their cit-izens from visiting, but around 160 foreign tourists arrived on Saturday, one offi cial said.

Some were not worried.“Why should we be scared?

It is a nice place and people are very helpful,” said Molly, a Swiss tourist.

Nevertheless, tourism is bound to suff er as tensions rise.

“All of a sudden tourists left ... I have no work for the last two days. We are up for bad times,” said Abdul Rashid Shah, 53, a boatman at the Dal Lake.

On the Pakistani side, the au-thorities asked villagers along the de facto Kashmir border to remain alert.

The advisory came yesterday after Pakistani offi cials evacu-ated more than 50 Chinese na-tionals working on a dam being constructed in Pakistani Kash-mir along the confl uence of the Neelum and Jhelum rivers.

Authorities moved the work-ers last Tuesday after the fi ring killed four civilians – including a four-year-old boy – and criti-cally injured 11 others, authori-ties said.

Authorities asked the villag-ers through social media and WhatsApp messages to remain alert and not to approach any suspicious object as the “enemy was using toy bombs, mortar shells and artillery”.

Local authorities later took a group of reporters to the Noseri area, on the LOC where Badr Munir, a senior government of-fi cial, briefed them on the esca-lation at the de facto border.

“Four people have been killed and 11 other wounded by clus-ter bombs in two diff erent inci-dents,” Munir said.

An AFP reporter at the scene saw that the Noseri Bazaar ap-peared deserted, with shops closed and less traffi c than usual on the roads.

Authorities also showed two unexploded cluster bombs to re-porters.

The site was cordoned off by police to prevent people from getting closer to avoid any fur-ther damage.

Munir said a group of experts along with police was searching for more unexploded bombs.

Mohamed Siddique, father of a cluster bomb victim in the area, told reporters that his chil-dren were playing outside when they found the unexploded weapon and brought that home.

“It exploded as they were playing with it. My son Ayan Ahmad died and 11 people were wounded in the incident,” Sid-dique said.

Cluster munitions can con-tain dozens of smaller bomblets that disperse over large ar-eas, often continuing to kill and maim civilians long after they are dropped.

Their use is banned under an international treaty, which neither India nor Pakistan has signed on to.

Kashmir is ruled in part but claimed in full by both coun-tries, who have fought two of their three wars since independ-ence in 1947 over it.

Pakistan calls for Trump mediation on KashmirAlert for Pakistan villagers amid tension with India

Reuters/AFPIslamabad/Muzaff arabad/Srinagar

This handout picture released by the Press Information Department (PID) shows Prime Minister Imran Khan chairing the National Security Committee meeting in Islamabad. Fears of an impending curfew in the disputed region of Kashmir ratcheted up tensions yesterday, as nuclear rivals India and Pakistan traded accusations of military clashes at the de facto border.

The no-trust vote fi asco in the Senate has caused serious distrust between

the two main opposition parties, with leaders from the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz (PML-N) suspecting each other.

The leaders of the two rival parties have found accusing each other – mostly in private – of playing a “dirty game” during the secret ballot on the no-trust motion against Senate Chairman Sadiq Sanjrani, in which the op-position alliance was defeated due to the betrayal of 14 legisla-tors.

The PML-N’s Khawaja Asif and the PPP’s parliamentary leader in the Senate Sherry Reh-

man even made their “distrust” public by issuing statements ac-cusing each other of damaging the opposition’s unity.

Even so, the two parties are unanimous in their view that there is a need for changing the rules regarding no-trust resolu-tions against the Senate chair-man or deputy chairman.

PPP chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari announced at a press conference in Lahore that the party would seek amendments to the parliamentary rules and constitution to do away with the requirement of a “secret ballot” during votes in the parliament.

He also expressed the hope that the ruling Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) would back this move, as it is part of its mani-festo.

Though both the parties have formed their fact-fi nding com-

mittees to identify the defec-tors and suggest punitive action against them, background inter-views with the members of the committees revealed that they have “very little hope” for suc-cess.

The PPP committee is to con-vene its fi rst meeting tomorrow (August 6) in Islamabad.

An offi cial announcement by the PPP says that the “fact-fi nding committee” will meet in Islamabad to “begin investi-gations into whether, and who, among party senators defected in the secret ballot in the last week no-confi dence move against the Senate chairman”.

Former prime minister You-suf Raza Gillani is the convener of the PPP committee, having representation from all the prov-inces with no sitting senator in it.

A committee member said

they would discuss their terms of reference (ToR) and fi nalise a methodology to probe the matter that had brought embarrassment to the joint opposition.

Sources said the mistrust be-tween the two parties had been there since the day they had submitted the no-trust motion against Sanjrani last week.

In one of the meetings, a PML-N senator sought a clarifi cation from the PPP leaders over a re-ported meeting between former president Asif Ali Zardari, who is in National Accountability Bureau (NAB) custody, and a top property tycoon the night before the voting, allegedly to discuss how the no-confi dence motion could be thwarted.

The PPP leaders, the sources said, categorically refuted these reports.

Similarly, after several com-

plaints against the PML-N sena-tors for not turning up for op-position meetings, the PPP’s Senator Rehman fi nally contact-ed Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly Shehbaz Sharif, through former speaker Ayaz Sadiq, asking the PML-N president to ensure their attend-ance, the sources said.

Rehman has criticised the PML-N’s Khawaja Asif over his remarks on a TV channel against PPP senators, holding them re-sponsible for the Senate debacle and terming the PPP’s move to form the fact-fi nding committee a “drama”.

She said that Asif had tried to destroy the opposition’s unity and asked the PML-N leadership to explain why.

Rehman said the PPP also had reservations over some parties in the opposition alliance, but did

not express this in the larger in-terest of the opposition’s unity.

Addressing a news confer-ence, PPP chairman Bilawal al-leged that Prime Minister Imran Khan’s close aide Jehangir Tareen and Punjab Governor Chaudhry Sarwar had contacted PPP sena-tors and attempted to persuade them (to vote for Sanjrani).

“The senators told me about this. I have full faith in my all senators, and I haven’t accept-ed the resignations of any of them. Propaganda is being made against them,” he said, advising the opposition parties not to in-dulge in the blame game.

“When it was alleged that the PML-N had cut a deal, I rejected it. Now, if someone from the op-position points a fi nger at my senators for foul play, it means he is pointing the fi nger at me,” Bi-lawal said.

In reply to a question about alleged interference of an in-telligence agency in the Senate election, as alleged by National Party chief Hasil Bizenjo, the PPP chairman said: “I have no such reports. However, there had been involvement of non-democratic forces in Senate elections in the past.”

Opposition diff erences erupt over Senate vote fi ascoInternewsIslamabad

Bilawal: If someone from the opposition points a finger at my senators for foul play, it means he is pointing the finger at me.

Majority of work done on Kartarpur corridorInternewsLahore

Pakistan has completed 90% of the work on the Kartarpur Corridor, in-

cluding the construction of the main road, bridge, and buildings from the “zero” line to Gurdwara Sahib, ahead of its launch in No-vember.

The fi rst batch of pilgrims from India will arrive in Pakistan on November 9.

The number of visitors had not yet been specifi ed.

From the Pakistani side of the border, Prime Minister Imran Khan and Chief of the Army Staff (COAS) General Qamar Javed Bajwa are likely to inaugurate the corridor on the occasion of Baba Guru Nanak’s anniversary in No-vember.

The Kartarpur crossing will link Dera Baba Nanak in Indian Punjab with Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Pakistan.

Both sides have agreed to maintain a channel of communi-cation and work towards fi nali-sation of the agreement.

The technical teams will meet again to ensure seamless con-nectivity for the corridor is op-erational in time so that the pil-grimage can begin in November this year.

The corridor, once operation-al, will provide visa-free access to Sikhs from India to their ho-liest shrine located inside Paki-stan.

This will also be the fi rst visa-free corridor between the two nuclear-armed neighbours since their independence in 1947.

The proposal has been in the works for over two decades.

However, it only began to take shape when last August the gov-ernment of Prime Minister Khan announced that Pakistan was planning to open the corridor.

In November, Khan performed the groundbreaking ceremony to build a 4km corridor at Kartar-pur.

The ceremony was attend-ed by the premier’s friend and former Indian cricketer Navjaot Singh Sidhu.

Gurdwara Kartarpur Sahib, considered the holiest place in Sikh religion because it is the last resting place of Baba Guru Nan-ak, is located in Narowal, only 4km from the Indian border.

The shrine is visible from the Indian side of the border, and everyday a larger number of Sikh devotees gather to perform Dar-shan or sacred viewings of the site.

The two sides continued talks on the corridor despite their February 27 military stand-off .

India, which otherwise re-fused to engage with Pakistan, is fi nding it hard to dismiss the Kartarpur initiative, given the religious sentiments of Indian Sikhs attached to the corridor.

Some are concerned that giv-en the hostility between the two countries, the opening of the corridor may be delayed.

However, Pakistan is hopeful that the corridor will become functional on the 550th birth an-niversary of Baba Guru Nanak, in November this year.

Eid market

People gather at a market in Lahore, where animals intended for sacrifice during the Eid al-Adha, are sold.

A US delegation is due in Islamabad today for talks with Pakistani of-

fi cials, as the Afghan peace process intensifi es, and could lead to a presidential visit to the region, if it succeeds.

Also, US special envoy for Afghanistan Zalmay Khalil-zad is in Doha to “resume talks with the Taliban”, he wrote in a tweet in Dari.

“The Taliban have shown signs of a willingness to com-promise. We are ready for a good deal,” he added.

In Washington, diplomatic sources said that Alice Wells, the Trump administration’s point-person for South and Central Asia, is coming to Is-lamabad for talks with Paki-stani offi cials on Afghanistan and bilateral relations.

The sources said this would be a follow-up of the US-Paki-stan consultations that began

in Washington, when Prime Minister Imran Khan visited and met US President Donald Trump at the White House on July 22.

They said if the Doha talks led to an agreement between the US and Taliban, Trump might visit Afghanistan in September to fi nalise the deal.

And if Trump visits Af-ghanistan, Pakistan would try to bring him to Islamabad as well, to further strengthen the impression that relations be-tween Islamabad and Wash-ington are improving rapidly, according to the sources.

Although close allies once, relations between the US and Pakistan deteriorated after May 2011, when the Ameri-can intelligence discovered Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad and a team of US Navy Seals took him out.

However, ties began to im-prove late last year, when Pa-kistan persuaded the Taliban to hold direct talks with Wash-ington.

US delegation due to arrive for Afghan talks

InternewsIslamabad

PHILIPPINES17Gulf Times

Monday, August 5, 2019

Rescuers retrieve a body from one of the ferries which capsized at a port in Iloilo City.

A photo from the Philippine Red Cross shows a capsized ferry off the waters of Iloilo City.

Fishermen carrying a dead body after the boat accident in Iloilo-Guimaras Strait.

Toll from Philippines boat tragedy rises to 25AFPManila

The death toll from three boats sinking surged to 25 as rescuers retrieved

more bodies from the sea off the central Philippines, offi cials said yesterday. Squalls tipped over the three wooden-hulled out-riggers in the Guimaras Strait on Saturday as the rest of the coun-try was battered by rains induced by seasonal southwest monsoon winds, the coastguard said.

The bodies of 14 passengers and crew were recovered, civil defence offi cial Franco Agudo told AFP, taking the toll to 25. Regional police chief Rene Pa-muspusan also confi rmed yes-

terday that 25 people had died, with six others still missing. He said 55 individuals were rescued.

Yesterday, the state-run Phil-ippine News Agency (PNA) re-leased a dramatic photo of rescue divers placing two corpses, one still wearing a red life vest, on top of the only parts of one boat left above water.

The Southeast Asian archipel-ago nation has a poor shipping safety record, with scores dying in maritime mishaps every year, usually aboard boats that move people from one small island to another.

Sea accidents historically spike during the middle of the year, when the country is fre-quently hit by storms and ty-phoons.

Duterte calls for ‘severe measures’ against NPABy Catherine S ValenteThe Manila Times

In the wake of the spate of killings in Negros Oriental, President Rodrigo Duterte

ordered the military to give the communist rebels “what they deserve,” as he reiterated his plan to implement “severe measures” to address the country’s peace and order problems.

In his speech at the distribu-tion of land certifi cates to agrar-ian reform benefi ciaries in Davao City on Friday night, Duterte blamed the New People’s Army (NPA) for the killings in the country, particularly in Negros Oriental.

“You have crossed the red line. There never was a time that the military or myself allowed torture or to hurt people who surrendered from the NPAs or captured. I will never allow it,” Duterte warned.

“I served notice the other day that I will not take it sitting down. I’ve been telling you, I will implement a more severe meas-ure. What is it? Maghintay lang kayo. Kasi sabi ko sumosobra na kayo (Just you wait. You have gone overboard),” he added.

On the series of killings in Ne-gros Oriental, the president said he would not allow the NPA to overpower the local government.

“The local government’s down. I will give you tit for tat. That’s my order to the military. Give them what they deserve,” he said.

“They are not fi ghting a con-ventional war. They are not obeying the Geneva Conven-

tion,” he added.The palace ear-lier said martial law might be declared in Negros to address the security problem there. The president insisted that the kill-ings in Negros Oriental were not sanctioned by the government. “Itong mga komunista (These communists), they’re blam-ing government for the killings when, actually, you started the spate of murders there. Ang pinakamarami na may tama (Most of those killed), the hard-est hit are a group of government men — soldiers, policemen and

people who are openly for the government, and mga barangay (village) captain,” he said.

“Why would I kill? What for? If I can use your carcass as a fer-tiliser, I might do that to increase the yield,” the president added. “The reason why we cannot de-velop fully is the countryside is infested with parasites like you,” he said. “Sumosobra na kayo (you have gone too far).”

“I am short of policemen and soldiers. But you cannot do it (killings) unrestrained, unbri-dled, uncontrolled as if you are

the killing machine of the Phil-ippines,” he added.

On July 26, human rights group Karapatan alleged that the killings in Negros Oriental worsened following the deploy-ment of additional state forces in the province. At least 17 people have been killed in diff erent ar-eas in Negros Oriental from July 18 -July 27.

Duterte slammed Karapatan, whom he described as “a group of devils in the Philippines.”

“Ang Karapatan is a front (of the communists), just like our barangay captains are our legal fronts. Kayong mga Karapatan ang samahan ng demonyo sa Pil-ipinas (Yours is a group of devils in the Philippines),” the presi-dent said.

Rodrigo Duterte

PNP backs Duterte plan to arm firemen

The Philippine National Police (PNP) supports the idea of President Rodrigo Duterte to arm members of the Bureau of Fire and Protection (BFP) to augment the police in maintaining order.“This move of tapping the BFP as force multiplier by allowing its uniformed personnel to bear firearms would also further bolster the government’s campaign against criminality and ef-fectively capacitate the BFP in responding to national emergency,” PNP spokesman Brig Gen Bernard Banac said in a statement.Banac said in many occa-sions, firefighters hesitate to enter a fire scene without police protection because they have experienced angry mobs attacking them.“If licensed private security guards are allowed by law to carry licensed firearms to serve as force multipliers of the PNP, then there’s more reason that uniformed BFP personnel, who could also

be targeted by criminals, shall also be issued firearms for self-defence, with proper training on marksmanship and gun-safety, and for peace and order tasks,” he added.On Thursday, President Du-terte said he wanted to arm firefighters, saying the job of BFP personnel is not limited only to killing fire. “You know, you have to help in the law and order. You are not limited to just fire. You have to go around and help the policeman and the military,” the president said in a speech during the 28th founding anniversary of the BFP.Banac said the PNP, BFP and Bureau of Jail Management and Penology assisting the Armed Forces of the Philip-pines “in times of national emergency” is mandated, upon direction of the President, under Section 12 of Republic Act 6975 or the “Department of the Interior and Local Government Act of 1990.” – The Manila Times

Palace blasts New York Times editBy Catherine S ValenteThe Manila Times

Malacanang criticised an editorial by the New York Times (NYT) that

cited an international watchdog’s survey that ranked the Philip-pines as the world’s “bloodiest” place for land and environmental rights activists.

Palace spokesman Salvador Panelo said the editorial was “not surprising” since the newspaper “has been dishing out false infor-mation and untruthful narratives on the

Philippine situation” under President Rodrigo Duterte’s lead-ership. “The American publica-tion has not exerted the research required of responsive journal-ism. Neither did it conduct an in-depth independent study on such a delicate subject-matter,” Panelo said in a statement.

“The NYT has the reckless habit of relying mainly on false facts regarding this administra-tion’s campaign against illegal drugs and the causes of murders occurring in the land areas of the country, peddled by the commu-nist rebels and their supporting left-leaning organisations,as well as the political opposition,” he added.

In the editorial titled “In the fi ght to save the planet, its de-fenders are being killed,” the newspaper cited a survey by rights group Global Witness, naming the Philippines as the deadliest place for land defenders.

Earlier, the Palace blamed the reported rise in the number of

killings of land rights activists to the “viciousness” of the claim-ants.

“Global Witness made it ap-pear that it is the government which is to blame for the situ-ation, while failing or omitting to factor the local communist movement and armed confl icts as critical components thereof,” Panelo said.

“It has not considered the fact that many of our local authori-ties, security forces and even tribal leaders died protecting land rights against communist insur-gents who want to control these areas. Necessarily, the president had to undertake measures to maintain peace and order in the aff ected localities,” he added.

Panelo said Duterte was not “brutal,” as alleged in the edito-rial. “The president is not brutal. He does not allow any law en-forcer to use savage methods in enforcing the law. Anyone who goes against police protocols in eff ecting arrest and complying with court orders are prosecuted administratively and criminally,” Panelo said.

“The NYT has the reckless habit of relying mainly on false facts regarding this administration’s campaign against illegal drugs”

By Lucrezia ReichlinLondon

If indications of disappointing economic growth in the eurozone are confi rmed, the European Central Bank will loosen monetary

policy further in September. Last week, outgoing ECB President Mario Draghi signalled a further likely cut in the ECB’s rate on commercial banks’ overnight deposits with the central bank, which is already -0.4%. In addition, the ECB is discussing a new programme of asset purchases.

Economic stimulus is clearly needed. Annual infl ation is well below the ECB’s target of “close to, but below 2%,” and fi nancial markets expect it to remain so for years. What’s more, the eurozone has grown more slowly than the US economy since the 2008 global fi nancial crisis. Growth has fl agged since peaking in the third quarter of 2017, and slowed again in the second quarter of this year.

It is also clear that national governments in the eurozone are reluctant to provide a co-ordinated fi scal stimulus, despite the urgings of the ECB and many economists. Willingly or not, the ECB remains the only game in town.

The question is whether monetary policy alone can help to improve real growth and the infl ation outlook in the eurozone. Monetary policy can be a powerful tool. The key to President Franklin D Roosevelt’s successful eff ort to revive the US economy in the 1930s was not defi cit spending, but rather the large monetary stimulus resulting from America leaving the gold standard before continental European countries

did. Today, the ECB needs to engineer something similar with diff erent tools.

In principle, taking the ECB deposit rate further into negative territory should remove the restriction on future expected short-term interest rates turning negative, and therefore fl atten the forward yield curve. A rate cut should also put downward pressure on the euro’s exchange rate, potentially making eurozone exporters more competitive.

But such a move would be controversial, in particular because it would dent the profi tability of banks that cannot pass on negative ECB deposit rates to their customers. Such policies have heterogeneous eff ects across banks, and mitigating action, although feasible, requires complex engineering.

According to an analysis by the ECB’s staff , “strong” eurozone banks are able to pass on negative rates to their corporate clients; “weak” banks cannot.

The ECB is therefore considering ways to mitigate this – in particular by granting very favourable conditions on the special loans that it will off er under the TLTRO III programme, which are likely to be taken by the “weak” banks. In addition, a tiering system is being considered in which reserves below a certain threshold would not be subject to negative rates. But this is likely to benefi t the strongest banks of stronger core eurozone countries such as Germany, France, and the Netherlands, which together hold about one-third of total deposits at the ECB.

Beyond these technical considerations, policymakers must grapple with two root causes of excess demand for central-bank reserves among strong eurozone banks. One

is very high demand for safe assets in general – and banks in core eurozone countries have little incentive to hold their own governments’ debt when the interest rate is below the ECB deposit rate. Another cause is the segmentation of the eurozone’s interbank market, which, if the ECB implemented tiering, would prevent strong banks from benefi ting from arbitrage opportunities by lending to weak banks at a rate above -0.4%. Both causes are the result of the eurozone’s dysfunctional banking system, in which demand for safe assets involves both a “home bias” and a strong demand for core countries’ sovereign debt.

In these circumstances, the ECB will not fi nd it easy to implement a policy that would remove the constraint of the zero lower bound on interest rates, while ensuring that the policy’s distributional eff ects on banks and EU member states are neutral. Doing so will involve many instruments and complex design, far from the simple one-tool-for-one-target framework that was best practice before the fi nancial crisis.

Moreover, negative rates become less eff ective over time and, if protracted, may have undesirable eff ects – for example, by inducing savers to de-risk, thereby potentially generating asset-price bubbles and increasing fi nancial disintermediation. The positive stimulus from the depreciation of the euro’s exchange rate could off set these eff ects, but only if other central banks – and in particular the US Federal Reserve – do not ease at the same time. And on July 31, the Fed announced a widely expected quarter-percentage-point cut in its benchmark interest rate, while further future cuts cannot be excluded.

But the main problem is that neither negative rates nor quantitative easing can by themselves address the pervasive risk aversion holding back the eurozone economy. The ECB is trying to discourage demand for safe assets by making them more expensive to hold, but it cannot address the causes of the increase in such demand. This is a global trend driven by several factors, including demographic changes, widespread uncertainty linked to technological transformation, and political risks such as trade wars and nationalism. But in the eurozone they are exacerbated by the lack of reform of the single currency.

More than ten years after the fi nancial crisis, the eurozone’s fi nancial markets are still fragmented, and the supply of safe assets is limited by the conservative fi scal policy of northern European countries, particularly Germany. Eurozone policymakers must, therefore, fi nd the political will to design a comprehensive package of fi nancial and fi scal measures aimed at injecting new energy into the European project. Such a combined approach is essential to address the deep-rooted risk aversion sapping growth across the eurozone.

In the 1930s, America’s key stimulus was monetary rather than fi scal, but a vital ingredient of success was a comprehensive set of reforms coupled with a strong message capable of unifying the country. Today, Europe needs a twenty-fi rst-century version of that policy. – Project Syndicate

Lucrezia Reichlin, a former director of research at the European Central Bank, is Professor of Economics at the London Business School.

Gulf Times Monday, August 5, 2019

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Major surgeries showlevel of expertiseat Sidra Medicine

Sidra Medicine, a Qatar Foundation entity, continues to achieve new milestones making the country proud. The latest achievement is a successful minimally invasive keyhole brain surgery on a baby born with hydrocephalus, a condition in which fl uids collect in the brain. The procedure was a fi rst for Qatar and quite possibly the GCC region, according to Dr Ian Pople, division chief of neurosurgery at Sidra Medicine.

The state-of-the-art healthcare establishment is one of the few hospitals in the region to have invested in world-leading teams, best-in-class surgical equipment and technologies in such a short span of time. This has helped address the challenge for many young patients who along with their families, previously had to travel abroad to seek specialised treatment and care, as pointed out by neurosurgeon Dr Khalid al-Kharazi.

Sidra Medicine is the only hospital in Qatar and the Middle East to off er a neonatal respiratory ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation service), as announced recently. ECMO works by taking over the function of the lungs and sometimes the heart, and allowing the organs to rest and recover from a reversible condition like meconium aspiration syndrome.

It was only recently that Sidra Medicine successfully performed two major neurosurgeries on young epilepsy patients within a span of 10 days. The surgeries marked yet another landmark, since opening its inpatient hospital a year ago. The fi rst

surgery was performed on a two-year-old girl at Sidra Medicine’s new neurosurgery intra-operative MRI theatre suite (IMRIS). Sidra Medicine is one of the few women and children’s hospitals in the region to have a dedicated paediatric IMRIS suite as well as several fl agship paediatric sub-specialties including neurology, craniofacial and plastic surgery, urology and cardiology.

With the launch of the epilepsy neurosurgery at Sidra Medicine, paediatric patients in Qatar and the region now have access to state-of-the-art equipment and an international team of experts able to perform the most complex surgery and treatment procedures, eliminating the need to travel farther abroad for care and treatment.

A team consisting of 21 medical and surgical professionals, led by division chief of Paediatric Neurosurgery, Dr Ian Pople and neurosurgeon Dr Khalid al-Kharazi, conducted the surgery for several hours including an hour for the use of the intraoperative MRI. As Dr Pople said, “the ability to do such advanced surgery is indicative of the level of expertise that we have in Qatar as well as the investment that the government of Qatar has made in off ering state-of-the-art care.”

The girl’s mother recalled initially being very worried about her having to undergo major surgery at such a young age. “We even sought a second opinion from Europe and were very reassured when we were told that the surgery and care that our child was receiving at Sidra Medicine from experts in neurology and surgery was at best practice global standards,” she added.

Research is a key pillar of Sidra Medicine. Several ongoing key projects will benefi t those living in Qatar, the wider region and beyond. Sidra Medicine is also working towards building national capacity through training and medical education.

Research is a key pillar of Sidra Medicine

ECB loosening is not enough

A euro sign sculpture stands illuminated in front of the European Central Bank (ECB) headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany.

COMMENT

Gulf Times Monday, August 5, 2019 19

The inequality of nationsBy Michael SpenceMilan

The 18th-century British economist Adam Smith has long been revered as the founder of modern

economics, a thinker who, in his great works The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, discerned critical aspects of how market economies function. But the insights that earned Smith his exalted reputation are not nearly as unassailable as they once seemed.

Perhaps the best known of Smith’s insights is that, in the context of well-functioning and well-regulated markets, individuals acting according to their own self-interest produce a good overall result. “Good,” in this context, means what economists today call “Pareto-optimal” – a state of resource allocation in which no one can be made better off without making someone else worse off .

Smith’s proposition is problematic, because it relies on the untenable assumption that there are no signifi cant market failures; no externalities (eff ects like, say, pollution that are not refl ected in market prices); no major informational gaps or asymmetries; and no actors with enough power to tilt outcomes in their favour. Moreover, it utterly disregards distributional outcomes (which Pareto effi ciency does not cover).

Another of Smith’s key insights is that an increasing division of labour can enhance productivity and income growth, with each worker or company specialising in one isolated area of overall production. This is essentially the logic of globalisation: the expansion and integration of markets enables companies and countries to capitalise on comparative advantages and economies of scale,

thereby dramatically increasing overall effi ciency and productivity.

Again, however, Smith is touting a market economy’s capacity to create wealth, without regard for the distribution of that wealth. In fact, increased specialisation within larger markets has potentially major distributional eff ects, with some actors suff ering huge losses. And the refrain that the gains are large enough to compensate the losers lacks credibility, because there is no practical way to make that happen.

Markets are mechanisms of social choice, in which dollars eff ectively equal votes; those with more purchasing power thus have more infl uence over market outcomes. Governments are also social choice mechanisms, but voting power is – or is supposed to be – distributed equally, regardless of wealth. Political equality should act as a counterweight to the weighted “voting” power in the market.

To this end, governments must perform at least three key functions. First, they must use regulation to mitigate market failures caused by externalities, information gaps or asymmetries, or monopolies. Second, they must invest in tangible and intangible assets, for which the private return falls short of the social benefi t. And, third, they must counter unacceptable distributional outcomes.

But governments around the world are failing to fulfi l these responsibilities – not least because, in some representative democracies, purchasing power has encroached on politics. The most striking example is the United States, where electability is strongly correlated with either prior wealth or fundraising ability. This creates a strong incentive for politicians to align their policies with the interests of those with market power.

To be sure, the Internet has gone some way toward countering this trend. Some politicians – including Democratic presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren – rely on small individual donations to avoid becoming beholden to large donors. But the interests of the economically powerful remain signifi cantly overrepresented in US politics, and this has diminished government’s eff ectiveness in mitigating market outcomes. The resulting failures, including rising

inequality, have fuelled popular frustration, causing many to reject establishment voices in favour of spoilers like President Donald Trump. The result is deepening political and social dysfunction.

One might argue that similar social and political trends can also be seen in developed countries – Italy and the United Kingdom, for example – that have fairly stringent restrictions on the role of money in elections. But those rules do not stop powerful insiders from wielding disproportionate

infl uence over political outcomes through their exclusive networks. Joining the “in” group requires connections, contributions, and loyalty. Once it is secured, however, the rewards can be substantial, as some members become political leaders, working in the interests of the rest.

Some believe that, in a representative democracy, certain groups will always end up with disproportionate infl uence. Others would argue that more direct democracy – with voters deciding on

major policies through referenda, as they do in Switzerland – can go some way toward mitigating this dynamic. But while such an approach may be worthy of consideration, in many areas (such as competition policy), eff ective decision-making demands relevant expertise. And government would still be responsible for implementation.

These challenges have helped to spur interest in a very diff erent model. In a “state capitalist” system like China’s, a government acts as a robust counterweight to the market system.

In theory, such a system enables leaders, unencumbered by the demands of democratic elections, to advance the broad public interest. But with few checks on their activities – including from media, which the government tightly controls – there is no guarantee that they will. This lack of accountability can also lend itself to corruption – yet another mechanism for turning government away from the public interest.

China’s governance model is regarded as dangerous by much of the West, where the absence of public accountability is viewed as a fatal fl aw. But many developing countries are considering it as an alternative to liberal democracy, which has plenty of fl aws of its own.

For the world’s existing representative democracies, addressing those fl aws must be a top priority, with countries limiting, to the extent possible, the narrowing of the interests the government represents. This will not be easy. But at a time when market outcomes are increasingly failing to pass virtually any test of distributional equity, it is essential. - Project Syndicate

Michael Spence, a Nobel laureate in economics, is Professor of Economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

This is the apple’s healthiest part, says study

Behind the MAX crisis: Lax regulator, top-down company culture

Live issues

By Najja ParkerThe Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Love munching on apples? You could be missing out on the best part of the fruit, according to a new report.

Researchers from Graz University of Technology in Austria recently conducted a study, published in the Frontiers of Microbiology journal, to explore how the food’s bacteria, much of which promotes gut health, aff ects the human body.

To do so, they assessed the bacterial content of the diff erent components of an apple, including the stem, peel, fruit pulp, seeds, and calyx. They examined both organic and conventional store-bought apples.

After analysing the results, they found a typical 240g organic or conventional apple contains around 100mn bacteria, and much of it is located in the fruit’s core, particularly the seeds. Only 10mn bacterial cells live in the fl esh.

“To the heroes among you who eat

the whole apple: besides extra fi bre, fl avonoids and fl avour, you’re also quaffi ng 10 times as many bacteria per fruit as your core-discarding counterparts,” the authors said in a statement.

But organic apples have an edge over the conventional ones, because they “harbour a more diverse and balanced bacterial community - which could make them healthier and tastier than conventional apples, as well as better

for the environment,” the team said.For example, escherichia-shigella,

which includes known pathogens, was found in most of the conventional apples but not the organic ones. Lactobacilli, which is a type of probiotic, was found in most organic apples but not conventional ones. And methylobacterium, known to enhance the biosynthesis of strawberry fl avour compounds, was more prominent in organic apples.

The scientists now hope to continue their investigations to better understand the bacteria makeup of other fruits.

“The microbiome and antioxidant profi les of fresh produce may one day become standard nutritional information, displayed alongside macronutrients, vitamins and minerals to guide consumers,” the scientists concluded. “Here, a key step will be to confi rm to what extent diversity in the food microbiome translates to gut microbial diversity and improved health outcomes.” - Tribune News Service

AFPNew York

Even before the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes claimed 346 lives, Boeing fl ight tests had revealed problems

similar to those encountered by pilots on the ill-fated 737 MAX fl ights.

Company offi cials learned that its MCAS anti-stall system – which is at the centre of both accidents – activated within minutes of takeoff , repeatedly pushing the nose of the aircraft down even when the plane was operating in normal conditions at lower speed.

This discovery, recounted to AFP by two former Boeing engineers who spoke on the condition of anonymity, suggested that mastering the MCAS was important for safely fl ying the MAX.

The MCAS should have been closely vetted by regulators, and procedures for operating the system should have been included in plane manuals and highlighted during pilot training.

But none of that happened.Before the Lion Air disaster in

October, the MCAS was not even named in the offi cial documents given to pilots.

In the earliest documents submitted to the Federal Aviation Administration, Boeing said the MCAS would only activate under abnormal conditions, such as a sudden turn at great speed.

Boeing later amended its documents to say MCAS could be activated at lower

speeds, but maintained throughout that there were no signifi cant safety changes compared with earlier models.

FAA representatives were present during a test fl ight when an MCAS problem occurred, according to a regulatory source, but approved the MAX without independently studying or testing the fl ight system.

Instead, regulators deferred on key aspects of certifi cation to Boeing, allowed under a congressionally-mandated program begun in 2005 while the FAA faced budget pressure.

In essence, Boeing chose the engineers who would inspect its planes in a process rubber-stamped by the agency.

The FAA had assessed the MAX as safe, and the plane lacked the degree of alterations from its predecessor, the NG, that would require signifi cant additional pilot training.

Yet the MCAS, short for the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, was added to the MAX, a more fuel-effi cient model with a heavier engine and diff erent aerodynamics.

But following the Lion Air crash on October 28, 2018, the FAA acknowledged it lacked full understanding of the MCAS, a government source said.

The agency did not realise it could be diffi cult for a pilot to regain control of the plane once MCAS was activated.

Instead of grounding the plane, the FAA on November 7 issued an

“emergency” airworthiness order for MAX operators, calling for new procedures for pilots encountering the problem with MCAS.

The agency also directed Boeing to correct the MCAS problem, while planes continued to fl y, and that eff ort was still underway when the Ethiopian fl ight crashed fi ve months later.

“The 737 MAX certifi cation program involved 110,000 hours of work on the part of FAA personnel, including fl ying or supporting 297 test fl ights,” an agency spokesman said.

But amid renewed public scrutiny, including into the relationship between the FAA and Boeing, the timeline for returning the MAX to the skies remains cloudy. Boeing has threatened to halt production of the plane, putting thousands of jobs at risk while numerous probes investigate the MAX certifi cation.

Boeing was under pressure when it began developing the MAX in 2011.

Airbus had sprinted ahead of Boeing in the race for new single-aisle planes, a lucrative market, with its A320 Neo, while Boeing was hitting hurdles with other ventures, including the 787, which was running behind schedule.

“They wanted us to control costs,” said an engineer, who described tensions between technical and managerial staff .

“Everything was designed to stop an ability to communicate concerns upward,” said another engineer.

“Delivering bad news was generally

regarded as a very bad career move,” said Richard Aboulafi a, a longtime industry analyst at the Teal Group, an aerospace market analysis fi rm, who described former Boeing chief executive Jim McNerney as obsessed with share price.

During McNerney’s tenure, Boeing shares more than doubled.

“We did not cut corners or push the 737 MAX out before it was ready. Safety is always the fi rst priority,” Boeing said.

But Arthur Wheaton, a professor at the Worker Institute at Cornell University in New York specialising in labour relations, said, “Boeing culture is to not value the employees but to try put more (of) the power ... on the managers to get the work done for a price, as opposed to the eff ectiveness.”

The company did fi nally apologise – albeit 25 days after the Ethiopian accident.

“I don’t even recall Boeing apologising for an accident involving one of their planes before now; so I would say this is a change from the past,” said Scott Hamilton, managing director at Leeham, a market intelligence fi rm.

“We know we fell short in some areas, including in communication with pilots, regulators and customers. We’re going to make improvements and we own that,” Boeing said.

The FAA, meanwhile, said it welcomes ongoing reviews of its performance and “will incorporate any changes that would improve our certifi cation activities.”

Democratic presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren rely on small individual donations to avoid becoming beholden to large donors.

A typical 240g organic or conventional apple contains around 100mn bacteria, and much of it is located in the fruit’s core, particularly the seeds. Only 10mn bacterial cells live in the flesh. Much of the bacteria promotes gut health.

WARNINGInshore : NilOffshore : Expected strong wind

with high sea to the north east

WEATHERInshore : Hot daytime with slight

dust at some placesOffshore : Fine to some clouds

at times

WINDInshore : Northwesterly-Norther-

ly 05-15/20 KTOffshrore : Westerly-Northwesterly

08-18/23 KT

Visibility : 4-8 KM

Offshore : 3-5/8 FT

TODAY

TUESDAY

WEDNESDAY

Maximum Temperature : 440c

Minimum Temperature : 340c

Maximum Temperature : 440c

Minimum Temperature : 330c

Maximum Temperature : 430c

Minimum Temperature : 350c

BaghdadKuwait City ManamaMuscat Tehran

AthensBeirut BangkokBerlinCairoCape TownColomboDhakaHong KongIstanbulJakartaKarachiLondonManilaMoscowNew DelhiNew YorkParisSao PauloSeoulSingaporeSydneyTokyo

Weather

today

Sunny

Sunny

Sunny

Sunny

Sunny

Max/min

44/29

46/33

41/34

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41/27

Weather

tomorrow

Sunny

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Sunny

Max/min

46/30

46/34

42/34

36/32

39/26

Around the region

Around the world

Max/min

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15/12

30/26

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13/09

33/28

29/23

28/18

18/12

36/26

31/28

18/07

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today

M Sunny

M Sunny

S T Storms

Cloudy

P Cloudy

Showers

T Storm

S T Storms

M Sunny

Sunny

M Sunny

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33/27

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26/17

24/13

38/27

31/27

18/07

36/26

Weather

tomorrow

Sunny

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S T Storms

M Cloudy

Sunny

Cloudy

T Storm

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Fisherman's forecast

Three-day forecast

20 Gulf TimesMonday, August 5, 2019

QATAR

Drive to remove abandoned vehicles begins in Al Daayan

A joint campaign to remove abandoned vehicles at various areas within Al

Daayan Municipality started yesterday as part of a Ministry of Municipality and Environment (MME) drive to curb the menace and enforce Law No 18 of 2017 on Public Hygiene.

The campaign was imple-mented by the Committee for

removing abandoned vehicles and the MME Department of Mechanical Equipment in co-operation with Al Daayan Mu-nicipality.

The department assistant di-rector and committee member Marzoq Mubarak al-Misifri, the General Cleaning Department assistant director and commit-tee member Mohamed Faraj al-

Kubaisi, the Municipal Control Department director Abdullah al-Nuaimi, Al Daayan Munici-pality’s General Control Section head Ali al-Humaidi, a number of representatives of the entities concerned at the Ministry of In-terior and the Internal Security Forces (Lekhwiya) attended.

Al-Misfri pointed out that the campaign to remove abandoned

vehicles across the country started in Doha city by the end of June then moved to Al Shee-haniyah and is now targeting the jurisdiction of Al Daayan.

While a total of 1,200 aban-doned vehicles have been re-moved since the start of the campaign, as many as 5,200 have been removed from all the municipalities across the coun-

try since the start of this year. He said that within the fi rst day of Al Daayan campaign 200 aban-doned vehicles were spotted and 20 were removed and the cam-paign will go on today.

Al-Kubaisi said that the joint committee for removing aban-doned vehicles has removed 61,524 abandoned vehicles since it was established in 2013

and until now, with 43,202 of these placed at Al Mashaf im-pound ground and 18,312 at Abu Hamour.

Al-Humaidi pointed out that this campaign covers all the ar-eas within the jurisdiction of Al Daayan Municipality, where warning stickers are placed on abandoned vehicles for their owners to remove them within

three days failing which they will be removed by the committee.

Recently, the MME has opened a new site for impound-ing abandoned vehicles at Al Mazrouah Area within Umm Salal Municipality, which ac-commodates up to 25,000 ve-hicles, in addition to the exist-ing two other locations at Al Mashaf and Mesaimeer.

Off icials at the launch of the campaign at Al Daayan Municipality yesterday. An ISF off icial preparing to remove an abandoned vehicle.

QNRF, education ministry supports Qatari students for astronomy OlympiadQatar National Research

Fund (QNRF), a member of Qatar Foundation, in

collaboration with the Ministry of Education and Higher Edu-cation (MoEHE), is supporting the representation of fi ve high school students from Qatar in the International Olympiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics (IOAA) 2019, currently being held in Budapest, Hungary.

Taking place from August 2-10, IOAA focuses on excep-tional high school students, testing them in astronomy and related subjects, and, this year, it has brought together repre-sentatives from 40 diff erent countries.

The fi ve local students were selected after a competitive

screening process that took place at the annual Qatar As-tro Olympiad competition – a part of the National Scientifi c Research Week held jointly by QNRF and MoEHE.

The participating students are: Amna Laram and Sara Na-bil from Qatar Secondary School for Girls; Aisha Mohamed Ali from Umm Ayman Secondary School for Girls; Salma Algamal from Alghowiriyah Secondary School for Girls and Abdelrah-man Tasabhji, a student at Ali Bin Jassem Secondary School for Boys.

Dr Aisha al-Obaidly, director of Capacity Building at QNRF, said, “QNRF is proud to sponsor the participation of these school students in this exciting inter-

national event so as to inspire and encourage them in continu-ing their interest in this fi eld. We look forward to these students becoming Qatar’s leading ex-perts in astronomy and astro-physics in the future who may one day contribute to break-throughs in global applications and knowledge in the fi eld.”

Dr Asmaa al-Muhannadi, head of Scientifi c Research Skills team at MoEHE, said, “In recent years we have noticed that stu-dents are taking an increased interest in space sciences – such as the study of satellites and communications-related fi elds, astronomy, and physics.

In preparation for the IOAA 2019, these students received special training on conducting

measurements, solving mathe-matical problems, and using tel-escopes and other astronomical instruments. I am glad to see our students’ continuous interest in this increasingly important fi eld, and wish them luck at this year’s Olympiad.”

Launched in 2007, in Thai-land, the Olympiad aims to in-spire the next generation of as-tronomers by encouraging them to study the subject at university level. The competition consists of four stages, including a the-oretical exam, a data analysis exam, an observational exam, and a team competition. Qatar was the fi rst Arab team to par-ticipate in IOAA in 2016, and has been participating every year since.

The Qatar team at the opening ceremony of the International Olympiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics 2019 in Hungary.

MoQ to host popular characters for Eid al-Adha celebrations

Mall of Qatar is bringing Nickelodeon’s popu-lar characters for ex-

clusive shows, activations and Meet & Greets during Eid al-Adha celebrations, it was an-nounced yesterday.

The free family entertain-ment will feature Nickelo-deon’s PAW Patrol’s Chase & Marshall, Shimmer & Shine, Dora The Explorer and SpongeBob in the best dance party ever, according to a statement.

The dynamic shows will be held on the Oasis Stage from August 11-17, at 2pm, 5pm and 8pm. After each show, the audience members can take a selfi e with their favourite character during the Meet & Greets. They can participate in fun-fi lled games and expe-riences in the activation area located in East Gate 1.

Every day during this 7-day celebration, Mall of Qatar is also giving visitors the oppor-tunity to up-close sing along with Nickelodeon’s Sponge-Bob SquarePants at noon,

3.30pm, 6.30pm and PAW Patrol’s Chase & Marshall at 12.40pm, 4.15pm, 7.15pm.

“We are committed to pro-vide the most diversifi ed and entertaining Eid al-Adha cel-ebrations and hope that our visitors will enjoy Nickelode-on’s super popular characters. Eid Mubarak to all!” said Malik Qaiser, Mall of Qatar acting CEO.

As part of the Qatar Summer Festival organised by the Na-tional Tourism Council, roam-ing artists will also entertain kids throughout the mall and shoppers can enter the raffl e draws for a chance to win cash prizes and super cars for every QR200 spent at any of the re-tailers. More information is available on mallofqatar.com.qa

Mall of Qatar is bringing Nickelodeon’s popular characters this Eid al-Adha.

Safe Summer campaign concludes

The third edition of the Safe Summer campaign by the Juvenile Police

Department under the Minis-try of Interior (MoI) concluded on Thursday. Awareness pro-grammes and exhibitions were held in addition to lectures by experts on developing good be-haviour.

Marking the valediction, an awareness programme was or-ganised in co-operation with the Ministry of Culture and Sports at Simaisma Youth Cen-tre on Thursday evening. An awareness exhibition was held at Hyatt Plaza. The exhibition

was aimed at making children as well as public cognisant of various services by the Juvenile Police Department and its ef-forts to ensure the well-being of children and youngsters.

The third edition of the Safe Summer campaign was held as part of the eff orts by the de-partment to make children and youngsters aware of negative behaviours that will result in danger during summer. During the awareness programme, of-fi cials of the Juvenile Police De-partment gave tips to children and youngsters.

The campaign also marked

distribution of brochures that included guidelines to stay safe during the summer. The Safe Summer campaign in its third edition targeted sports clubs, youth centres as well as com-mercial places where awareness programmes are carried out. The Juvenile Police Depart-ment launched the campaign in a bid to raise awareness about negative habits such as driving without a licence. The cam-paign also featured eff orts to help the youth get rid of dis-putes and making them aware of using social media networks in the right way.

Participants with off icials during the valediction of Safe Summer campaign.