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BUSINESS | 11 SPORT | 16

Volume 22 | Number 7216 | 2 RiyalsSaturday 8 July 2017 | 14 Shawwal 1438 www.thepeninsulaqatar.com

3rd Best News Website in the Middle East

QNA & Agencies

State of Qatar yesterday expressed "regret" over the recent statements of the Saudi-led Arab states boycotting it, say-

ing the accusations against Doha of supporting terrorism and interfering in other countries' internal affairs were "false" and "baseless".

In a joint statement released Wednesday in Cairo, Saudi Ara-bia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain voiced their collective "regret" over Qatar’s apparent refusal to meet their 13-point list of demands, including calls to close Al Jazeera.

"The false accusations con-tained in both statements represent an attempt to smear the State of Qatar, and run con-trary to the established bases of relations between countries, an official source at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel

bin Ahmed Al Jubeir declared that the "political and economic embargo" on Qatar — first imposed one month ago — was set to remain in place. He also warned that a raft of "fresh measures" would be taken against Qatar at the "appropri-ate time". The four states issued a similar statement on Thursday in Jeddah.

"A senior Foreign Ministry source described the statements' claims about the State of Qatar's interference in internal affairs of countries and financing terrorism as baseless allegations, noting that the Qatar's position on terrorism is consistent and known for its rejection and condemnation of all forms of terrorism whatever the causes and motives are," the state-ment said.

It added that Qatar was "an active member committed to international conventions in combating terrorism and its financing at the regional and international levels".

The source also slammed the

anti-Qatar bloc for accusing Doha of leaking the list of demands of the four countries saying "the allegations are base-less and can be refuted with evidence".

The statement has referred to the letter from the Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani to the Kuwait Emir as the mediator in this crisis, in which

he had confirmed Qatar's appre-ciation, as Emir, government and people, of his sincere and gen-erous efforts to end this crisis. The letter further expressed Qatar's readiness to cooperate on and investigate all the allega-tions that do not do not infringe on its sovereignty under the patronage of the esteemed medi-ator himself or whomsoever he

designates. Qatar remains ready "to cooperate and review all claims that do not contradict with its sovereignty under the sponsor-wship of the impartial mediator or whoever the mediator sees appropriate to participate in solv-ing the crisis as part of joint dialogue," the statement added.

→ Continued on page 2

Irfan Bukhari The Peninsula

A month after imposition of blockade on Qatar by three Gulf countries, the

expatriate communities settled here from across the world feel safe, comfortable and satisfied without having any apprehen-sions about their future in the host state.

Atilla Kuruçayırlı, a Turkish expat said that Qatar was the saf-est place in the world with the most humble people “who are trying to achieve great things for their nation”.

“Qatari brothers and sisters

should remember that whoever is trying to bring them down will never succeed. Qatari nation and its leaders have shown an excel-lent character during the blockade that needs to be taught as a case-study at international relations classes all over the world.” He said that she was proud to live and work in this c o u n t r y u n d e r a n y circumstances.

He said that Qatar's relation with Turkey was based on “one heart, one soul and one vision”. “We have never felt as a stranger here, indeed this is our home,” he added.

D o m i n i q u e R e t t i g

Kuruçayırlı, a German national said:

“It is probably the safest country to live in the world where people respect different cultures, traditions and religion.” She said that she always felt in Qatar like home and was impressed with the hospitality of the people of Qatar.

On the social media net-works too expatriates are active to repel false impres-sions being created by some neighbouring countries regarding everyday life of Qatar. Shamim Anjukandan writes: “I never felt myself that I am an expat here. We are safe

here than my home country.” Another Pakistani expatriate

Sohail Tariq wrote on Facebook that in his opinion people should stay in Qatar and prove that they were loyal with the country. “Qatar should start giving more visas for the visitors,” he suggested.

Ismail Sooraj from India thinks that Qatar is the best and safest place. “I love Qatar. May Allah Almighty bless Qatar,” he prayed. Kaliwal Khosti noted that everyone was feeling safe here in Qatar; no doubt.

An Arab expat, Hamdi Yeghouti said that Qatar was a haven for all nationalities while

another resident from Pakistan Nasir Zafar noted: “Qatar is the safest place in the world.”

Musoke Juma pledged that he would stay in Qatar “come what may”. Wu Ma Ling, a Fili-pino expat says that all Filipinos feel themselves safe and secure in Qatar.

Geghay Odtojan, an African national residing in Qatar said: “Qatar is a safe country; nothing to worry”, while Peter Gatimu f r o m K e n y a s a i d : “I feel safer here than in my home country Kenya.” On Qatar’s current safety situation, Wainaina Waweru from Nigeria said: “Safe, safe, safe.”

Expatriates feel secure despite lingering blockade

Qatar rejects siege countries' allegations

Sanaullah Ataullah The Peninsula

WITH THE increase in imports of fruits and vegeta-bles from different new sources notably from Indian and Iran markets, the prices of perishable goods have started slipping down to the normal level. “We have diversified our sources of import to make available food products espe-cially fruits and vegetables at reasonable prices in the local markets,” a manager of a shop-ping complex said.

→ Full report on page 2

The false accusations represent an attempt to smear the State of Qatar and run contrary to the established code of relations between countries: Foreign Ministry.

Sidi Mohamed The Peninsula

The display of solidarity and unity of the people with the leader Emir H H Sheikh

Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani contin-ues as telecommunication companies Ooredoo and Vodafone yesterday changed their network names to ‘Tamim Almajd’ as a way of showing their solidarity and sup-port to Qatar.

The portrait of the Emir titled ‘Tamim Almajd’ (Tamim is glory) has

become a symbol of unity and sol-idarity in social media and also seen at all places around Qatar hung on walls, plastered on buildings and vehicles.

"Qatar will always be free, ele-vated by the spirits of the loyal. Dear customer, Ooredoo's network name has been changed to "Tamim Almajd," Ooredoo said in a state-ment yesterday. It added that customers can visit any closest branch to change the name of the network to ‘Tamim AlMajd’.

→ Continued on page 2

Fruit, vegetable prices returning to normal

QNA

MINISTER OF Foreign Affairs of Ghana, Shirley Ayorkor Botchway, received yesterday copies of credentials of Mohammed bin Jaber Al Kuwari as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipo-tentiary of the State of Qatar to the Republic of Ghana.

The Minister expressed Ghana's support to Qatar, praising the Kuwaiti media-tion efforts regarding the current crisis in the GCC. The Minister wished the ambas-sador well in his mission and further development and progress in bilateral ties.

A ship from Turkey carrying approximately 4,000 tonnes of food arrives at Hamad Port in Doha, yesterday.

Ooredoo and Vodafone change network names to ‘Tamim Almajd’

Ghana supports Qatar; praises Kuwaiti mediation

Tillerson to visit

Kuwait on Monday

THE UNITED STATES will become more directly involved in trying to resolve the Gulf Crisis when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson arrives in Kuwait on Monday to meet with Kuwaiti officials who have been trying to mend the feud within the GCC. The sec-retary of state so far only has Kuwait on his itinerary but he could remain in the area and visit other capitals in what would amount to shuttle diplo-macy to resolve the dispute.

Agencies

FINANCE MINISTER H E Ali Sharif Al Emadi has said that the economic fundamentals of the State of Qatar are in a better position than its rivals and that Doha is rich enough to face the threats of the blockade.

Speaking to The Times newspaper, Al Emadi said the state's huge financial reserves, built on the sale of natural gas over decades, meant it could withstand sanctions.

"We have sovereign wealth funds of 250 percent of gross domestic product, we have Qatar Central Bank reserves, and we have a ministry of finance strategic reserve," he told The Times.

Although credit ratings agencies have downgraded Qatar's assessment of its financial outlook, Ali Sharif said the country was rich enough to sustain despite sanctions. He compared Qatar with the status of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain and Egypt. "Bahrain and Egypt are at junk-bond level," he said.

"If you look at Saudi Ara-bia, they are having genuine issues with their finances. We are the fastest-growing coun-try in the region, 40 per cent faster than the nearest Gulf Co-operation Council country.

Al Emadi: Qatar is rich enough to face blockade

d ed

e East

02 SATURDAY 8 JULY 2017HOME

Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ghana, Shirley Ayorkor Botchway (left), with Qatar's Ambassador Mohammed bin Jaber Al Kuwari in Accra yesterday. The Foreign Minister received copies of credentials of Mohammed bin Jaber Al Kuwari.

QNA

Foreign Minister H E Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani

met with Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Brit-ish House of Commons Crispin Blunt in London yesterday.

The meeting reviewed bilateral ties between the two countries and means of enhancing them.

The minister updated the British side on the latest developments in the Gulf cri-sis and the illegal actions taken against Qatar.

Foreign Minister meets British official in UK

QNA

Azerbaijan's Foreign Minister Elmar Mam-madyarov met Qatar's

Ambassador to Azerbaijan Yousif bin Hassan Al Saie, yesterday.

The meeting reviewed bilateral relations between the two countries and means of boosting and developing them, in addition to a number of issues of common concern, informed officials concerned after the meeting.

Azerbaijan's minister meets Qatar's envoy

QNA

Luis Merino, El Salva-dor's Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs for

Foreign Investment, met Qatar's Acting Charge d'Affaires in El Salvador Ahmed bin Mohammed Al Horr.

The meeting reviewed means of enhancing coop-eration prospects in addition to a set of issues of mutual interest.

The Salvadorian deputy minister expressed hope that the current Gulf crisis will be solved through peaceful and diplomatic means as well as mutual dialogue among all parties.

Salvador's minister meets Qatar's official

Sanaullah Ataullah

The Peninsula

With increasing import of fruits and vegeta-bles from different

new sources, notably from India and Iran, the prices of perisha-ble goods have started returning to normal level, The Peninsula noted.

The Airport branch of Lulu Hypermarkets yesterday offered a kg of tomato, imported from Iran, at QR4. Iranian cabbage, cauliflower and Kusa were also available at QR4, QR6.50 and QR6 per kg respectively.

A kg of Indian banana (Cav-endish) and Chile apple (royal gala) were selling at QR7.50 and QR6.75 respectively.

The Hypermarkets also offered Australian carrots and farm fresh cucumbers at QR8 and QR6 per kg respectively. Indian onions and Cyprus potato

were available at QR2.50 and 5.50 respectively. Several other verities of Indian vegetables were also being sold at about QR9 per kg.

“We have diversified our sources of import to make avail-able food products especially fruits and vegetables at reason-able prices in the local markets,” a manager of a shopping com-plex said.

“We noticed that fruits and vegetables imported from Iran and India are cheaper signifi-cantly compared to those coming from European countries,” he added. “Some fruits and vegeta-bles, that are not going to perish quickly, have started coming in refrigerator containers from India and Iran therefore they are cheaper compared to those imported from European coun-tries in regular cargo flights,” said the manager.

A big crowd at shelves dis-playing cheaper fruits and vegetables like tomato, onion, cucumbers and banana as con-sumers was seen buying these items in large quantities.

“I grabbed about 3kg of Indian tomato and 2kg banana,” said Mohamad Salem, a con-sumer from Egypt. “Now I am going to take some cucumbers and carrots. Prices of fruits and vegetables are cheaper at Hyper-markets and other outlets operating in shopping complexes like Lulu, Al Meera and Safari, perhaps they have started importing directly from export-ing countries, said Salim.

“We expect the prices will further fall as the availability of perishable goods like fruits and vegetables are gradually increas-ing in the local markets,” said

Naimullah, a Pakistani national. Dairy products are also

available in large quantities at reasonable prices in the local markets including commercial outlets, supermarkets and gro-cery shops throughout the country, The Peninsula noted.

The Turkish dairy products

took lion share in replacing the products of siege countries as they are available in large quan-tities at same prices of those coming from neighboring coun-tries. Turkish milk is available at one and two liters packs at QR6 and QR12 respectably.

Fresh stock of milk has

started coming from some Euro-pean countries but they are a little bit expensive compared to those imported from Turkey.

Two verities of fresh milk imported from UK were selling yesterday at an outlet at about QR13 for one liter and about QR17 for two liters.

Foodstuffs from Iran & India bring down pricesBig relief

Traders have diversified their sources of import to make available food products especially fruits and vegetables at reasonable prices in the local market.

Big crowd at shelves displaying cheaper fruits and vegetables like tomato, onion, cucumbers and banana as consumers was seen buying these items in large quantities.

Customers are busy picking tomatoes from the shelve at Lulu Hyper Market in Old Airport, yesterday.

Continued on page 4Vodafone also said, on its official Facebook page, that, “Dear

customers, your network name has been changed to "Tamim Almajd" and we are proud to have our network carry the name of Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani ."

Tamim AlMajd, is a slogan, became famous as it supports the Emir after the three Gulf counties imposed blockade on Qatar one month ago.

Qatar Post recently issued new postage stamps titled “Tamim Al Majd” featuring the picture of the Emir.

Ooredoo's initiative was among the top trending topics yes-terday on Twitter and Twitter users have appreciated the initiative. One Twitter user said: “Thanks to Ooredoo and Vodafone, we have become more proud about these companies.”

Another one said “They tried their best to divide us, but it did bring us closer than ever.”

Abdullah Alishaq said, “We are proud to have you, Ooredoo and Vodafone. Today in my grandma’s house everybody is happy for this carrier.”

The siege countries have banned its people from showing sym-pathy with Qatar, otherwise they will face jail and fine.

Recently, the UAE government arrested an Emarati Citizen, Ghanem Abdullah, who published a video on his personal account on Twitter expressing sympathy with Qatar. He said that Emirati and Qatari people are brothers and it is a big sin to divide these peoples. The video, which spread quickly on social media, annoyed the UAE government prompting it to close his Twitter account. They also removed the video and detained him to face a jail term up to 15 years.

Continued from page 1

Meanwhile, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson is in Saudi Arabia for the first in a series of meetings with Gulf leaders over the region's politi-cal crisis.

The Foreign Office says Johnson will meet in senior rep-resentatives of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emir-ates and Kuwait.

Johnson is urging Gulf states go get behind Kuwait-led efforts to end tensions between Qatar and four Arab countries.

US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis reaffirmed America's stra-tegic security partnership with Qatar on Thursday, the Penta-gon said, amid a diplomatic crisis in the Gulf.

It was also announced that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will travel to Kuwait — the key mediator in the crisis — on July 10 to discuss the row.

Mattis, who spoke with his Qatari counterpart Khaled bin Mohammed Al Attiyah by phone, discussed the status of opera-tions against the Islamic State group.

Qatar hosts a vital US-led command centre at the Al Udeid air base, where the anti-IS coa-lition launches raids against the jihadists. "Secretary Mattis and Minister Al Attiyah affirmed their commitment to continued US-Qatar cooperation and deepening their strategic part-nership," a Pentagon readout of the conversation stated.

Saudi Arabia is leading a four-country blockade of Qatar in the region's biggest crisis in years. Mattis stressed the impor-tance of de-escalating tensions "so all partners in the Gulf region

can focus on next steps in meet-ing common goals," the readout stated.

German intelligence will work with Qatar to resolve accu-sations by Gulf states, that country’s foreign minister said, reported Al Jazeera.

Sigmar Gabriel said Qatar agreed to share information about "certain people and insti-tutions" with German intelligence. There were no fur-ther details provided.

Gabriel visited Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar and Kuwait as part of a

three-day Gulf tour that began Monday.

Gabriel said on Tuesday that Berlin was in favor of solution-oriented approaches to the Gulf crisis and praised the US and Kuwait for their efforts as medi-ators, in a joint news conference with his Qatari counterpart, H E Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdul-rahman Al Thani.

"Germany has not taken the side of any party during the Gulf crisis. However, we support a solution-based approach and we are trying to figure out what the core of this problem is," he said.

British Foreign Secretary backs Kuwait's mediation

Public praise initiative of Ooredoo and Vodafone

Tunis

QNA

The Assistant Director General of the Arab League Educational

Cultural and Scientific Organisation (Alesco), Muhammad Abdul Bari Al Qudsi, received a message from Minister of Education and Higher Education H E Dr Mohammed bin Abdul Wahed Al Hammadi, yesterday.

The message included a request to the organisation to intervene to resolve the issue of Qatari and non-Qatari students who were prohibited from continuing their study in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain and Egypt due to the siege imposed by the four countries, informed sources.

Qatar's Ambassador to Tunisia Saad bin Nasser Al Humaidi delivered the message.

Qatar requests Alesco to resolve students issue

Ghana minister meets Qatar's envoy

03SATURDAY 8 JULY 2017 MIDDLE EAST / AFRICA

A protester wears a Qatar flag and waves a Palestinian flag during clashes with Israeli troops near the border between Israel and Central Gaza Strip, yesterday.

Gaza protests

Jerusalem

Reuters

The UN cultural organisa-tion declared an ancient shrine in the occupied West Bank a Palestinian heritage site yesterday,

prompting Israel to further cut its funding to the United Nations.

Unesco designated Hebron and the two adjoined shrines at its heart — the Jewish Tomb of the Patriarchs and the Muslim Ibrahimi Mosque — a “Palestin-ian World Heritage Site in Danger”.

Israeli Prime Minister Ben-jamin Netanyahu called that “another delusional Unesco deci-sion” and ordered that $1m be diverted from Israel’s UN funding to establish a museum and other projects covering Jewish heritage in Hebron.

The funding cut is Israel’s fourth in the past year, taking its UN contribution from $11m to just $1.7m, an Israeli official said. Each cut has come after various UN bodies voted to adopt decisions

which Israel said discriminated against it.

Palestinian Foreign Minister, Reyad Al Maliki, said the Unesco vote, at a meeting in Krakow, Poland, was proof of the “success-ful diplomatic battle Palestine has launched on all fronts in the face of Israeli and American pressure on (Unesco) member countries.”

Hebron is the largest Palestin-ian city in the occupied West Bank with a population of some 200,000. About 1,000 Israeli

settlers live in the heart of the city and for years it has been a place of religious friction between Muslims and Jews.

Jews believe that the Cave of the Patriarchs is where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and their wives, are buried. Muslims, who, like Christians, also revere Abraham, built the Ibrahimi mosque, also known as the Sanctuary of Abra-ham, in the 14th century.

The religious significance of the city has made it a focal point for settlers, who are determined to expand the Jewish presence there. Living in the heart of the city, they require intense security, with some 800 Israeli troops protect-ing them.

Even before Netanyahu’s budget announcement, Internal Security Minister Gilad Erdan sig-nalled Israel would seek to further make its mark at the Hebron shrine, tweeting: “Unesco will con-tinue to adopt delusional decisions but history cannot be erased ... we must continue to manifest our right by building immediately in the Cave of the Patriarchs.”

Unesco declares Hebron 'Palestinian heritage site'

Israel extends travel ban on Palestinian leaderJERUSALEM: Israeli Interior Minister Arie Deri has extended a travel ban issued against Sheikh Raed Salah, deputy leader of the Islamic Movement in Israel (northern branch), Israeli media reported. According to Israeli Channel 7, Deri renewed the travel ban on Salah — which effectively bars him from leaving the country — for an additional year.

“The minister based his decision on concerns that Salah’s departure from the country could be detrimental to state security,” the broad-caster reported.

Since 2015, Israel has pro-hibited Salah, who is seen as an icon of the Palestinian resistance, from traveling out-side the country for reasons ostensibly related to “national security”.

The Islamic Movement is outlawed by the Israeli authorities, who in recent years have repeatedly arrested Salah and shut down dozens of organizations -- including a number of charities -- over their alleged links to his group.

23 Egyptian soldiers killed in Sinai attackCAIRO/ISMAILIA: At least 23 Egyptian soldiers were killed when two suicide car bombs tore through military check-points in North Sinai province yesterday, security sources said, in one of the bloodiest coordinated assaults on secu-rity forces in years.

Islamic State militants are waging an insurgency in the rugged, thinly populated Sinai Peninsula.

They have killed hun-dreds of soldiers and police since 2013, when the military ousted Islamist President Mohamed Mursi after mass protests.

The two cars blew up as they passed through two checkpoints outside of a mil-itary compound just south of Rafah, on the border with the Gaza Strip, the security sources said. No group claimed responsibility for the attacks.

Washington

AFP

A review of past air and artil-lery strikes has found that another 119 civilians were

killed by the US-led coalition in Iraq and Syria, pushing the total number of such deaths to 603.

In a statement yesterday, the coalition said that in May it com-pleted an analysis of 141 reports of civilian deaths dating back to when operations to defeat the Islamic State group got under-way in late 2014.

"To date, based on informa-tion available, (the coalition) assesses that, it is more likely than not, at least 603 civilians

have been unintentionally killed by coalition strikes" since the anti-IS campaign began, the statement read.

Aside from probing civilian death reports that came in from coalition pilots and through social media and other channels, military investigators also began wading their way through a huge backlog of hundreds of allegations reported by the web-site Airwars.org.

The London-based collec-tive of journalists and researchers has always had civilian death tolls that are wildly divergent from those acknowledged by the coa-lition. According to the most recent Airwars tally, 4,354

civilians have been killed in coa-lition strikes.

Major Michael Burns, who compiled the coalition state-ment, told AFP that of the 80 Airwars reports it looked at in May, 10 were "credible" and 70 were "non-credible."

Among all the reports the coalition examined in May was an April 17 strike on an IS head-quarters building that caused secondary explosions, killing 25 civilians in adjacent structures and wounded 40 more.

And on January 21, near Mosul in Iraq, a strike on a sui-cide car bomb caused secondary explosions that killed 15 civilians.

Hamburg

Reuters

The United States, Russia and Jordan have reached a ceasefire and “de-esca-

lat ion agreement” in southwestern Syria, one of the combat zones in a six-year-old civil war, Washington and Mos-cow said yesterday.

The ceasefire will go into effect tomorrow, Russian For-eign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Jordan’s Petra news agency said.

The deal was announced after a meeting between US

President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit of major economies in the German city of Hamburg.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the area covered by the ceasefire affects Jordan’s security and is a “very compli-cated part of the Syrian battlefield.”

Russia and Iran are the main international backers of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad while Washington supports some of the rebel groups fighting for his ouster.

“I think this is our first

indication of the U.S. and Russia being able to work together in Syria, and as a result of that we had a very lengthy discussion regarding other areas in Syria that we can continue to work together on to de-escalate the areas,” Tillerson said.

The Syrian conflict has killed nearly half a million people, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, destroyed cities and forced millions of others to flee the country.

Backed by Russian air power, Assad has regained ground in the last year or so that

he lost to the mostly Sunni Mus-lim rebels earlier in the war.

The Syria deal appeared to be the main point of agreement at the first meeting between Trump and Putin, who also dis-cussed Moscow’s alleged interference in the U.S. 2016 presidential election and North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

Lavrov said the accord includes “securing humanitar-ian access and setting up contacts between the opposition in the region and a monitoring centre that is being established in Jordan’s capital.”

Tillerson said that by and

large the objectives of the United States and Russia in Syria “are exactly the same.”

But Washington and Moscow have long been at odds over Syria.

The United States has often called for the removal of Assad, who it blames for the shooting of protesters at the start of the conflict and, more recently, for launching chemical weapons attacks on civilians.

Russia and Iran strongly back the Syrian leader, who gives both countries a strategic foothold in the Mediterranean Sea.

US and Russia reach deal on Syria cease-fire

Ouagadougou

AFP

Authorities in Burkina Faso have accused 37 magistrates of corruption

in the first case of its kind in one of the world's poorest countries, an investigative commission said yesterday.

The commission said the magistrates had accepted bribes for freeing defendants on bail and for scheduling hear-ings in a certain way, saying money changed hands at the offices of investigators and judi-cial police "before every decision".

Local media regularly deplore examples of graft in the west African nation, but an offi-cial accusation of this kind is unprecedented.

Mazombe Jean Konde, head of the investigation commis-sion, said the probe had looked

at 51 cases and heard from 233 people including magistrates, court clerks, lawyers and mem-bers of the judiciary police.

"Most of the failures on the magistrates' part were facili-tated by lawyers, court clerks and members of the peniten-tiary guard," he said in a statement.

Judicial authorities are now set to decide how to discipline the magistrates, he added.

Some 45 percent of Burkina Faso's population live below the poverty line, according to the United Nations, and corruption is widespread. President Roch Marc Christian Kabore, elected in November 2015, made tack-ling graft one of his key campaign pledges.

He put forward a bill in February last year creating spe-cialised judicial authorities to tackle economic and financial crimes.

37 magistrates face graft claims in Burkina Faso

US-led strikes claim another 119 civilian lives in Iraq and Syria

Nigeria court rejects cleric's rights suitKANO: A Nigerian court has thrown out a suit brought by a prom-inent pro-Iranian Shia cleric against the military for human rights violations, lawyers in the case told AFP yesterday.

Ibrahim Zakzaky was seeking two billion naira ($5.6m) in dam-ages over clashes with troops in 2015 that left some 350 of his followers dead in the northern city of Zaria.

The cleric himself was injured and his been in custody ever since. Three of his children were killed and his house was destroyed.

Lawyer Dari Bayero, representing the military, said the case in Kaduna was struck out for abuse of process, "as the same suit was determined by another federal high court in Abuja".

"The court said the plaintiff (Zakzaky) cannot sue in piecemeal on the same issue at different courts but should consolidate their case in one court," he added.

NIAMEY: Niger authorities rescued 67 West African migrants in Niger's northern desert this week after traf-fickers left them there without food or water, a humanitarian source said.

One of the migrants later died. "Sixty-seven migrants near death were saved (Wednesday) by defence and security forces near the town of Segued-ine in the middle of the

desert," the source said.The migrants had left the

town of Agadez "on three vehicles" before being "aban-doned without provisions by the traffickers," the source added.

An Iraqi woman carries a child as they flee from the Old City of Mosul yesterday, during the Iraqi government forces' offensive to retake the city from Islamic State (IS) group fighters.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it “another delusional Unesco decision” and ordered that $1m be diverted from Israel’s UN funding to establish a museum and other projects covering Jewish heritage in Hebron.

67 migrants saved from Niger desert

04 SATURDAY 8 JULY 2017ASIA

Hamburg

IANS

In the wake of an army face-off and chill in ties, Prime Minister Narendra Modi shook hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping here

yesterday, and discussed "a range of issues" that possibly included their three-week-old border row.

The two leaders came face to face for the first time after their armies were involved in a face-off in the Doklam area in the Sikkim sector, that has heightened tensions between the two countries, including war-mongering by the Chinese media.

After the Chinese said on Thursday that a bilateral meet-ing between the two is unlikely because the "atmosphere" was not good, the two leaders shook hands warmly, smiled and then held informal discussions yes-terday at a BRICS leaders meeting.

"At BRICS leaders' informal gathering @Hamburg hosted by China, PM @narendramodi and President Xi had a conversation on a range of issues," External

Affairs Ministry spokesperson Gopal Baglay tweeted, without giving details of what they discussed.

At the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) lead-ers' meeting, Modi and Xi also complimented each other's nation's roles in furthering the objectives of the grouping and the fight against terrorism.

The two leaders last met in Kazakhstan capital Astana last month during the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit.

Addressing the meeting, Modi appreciated the momen-tum in BRICS under the chairmanship of President Xi and extended full cooperation and best wishes for the BRICS Sum-mit at Xiamen in China in September this year.

Concluding the meeting immediately after Modi's remarks, President Xi appreci-ated India's strong resolve against terrorism and the momentum in BRICS introduced under India's chairmanship and through the outcomes of the Goa Summit in 2016.

He also appreciated India's success in economic and social development and wished India even bigger success.

Modi also said that the five-nation BRICS has an important role to play in the global eco-nomic recovery.

Stating that the GDP of India was growing at a rate of over 7 per cent, he said that the Goods and Services Tax (GST) rolled out at the beginning of this month was the biggest tax reform ever implemented in the country.

Referring to reforms in India, including the recent introduction

of GST, Modi said that it was nec-essary to work together for sustained global economic recovery.

He advocated collective voice against the practices of protectionism, especially in the

spheres of trade and movement o f k n o w l e d g e a n d professionals.

He called for expeditious action to establish BRICS rating agency and stated that cooper-ation on development of Africa

should be a priority. He also called for greater people-to-peo-ple exchanges.

In their interventions, the leaders discussed preparations and priorities for the forthcom-ing Xiamen BRICS Summit.

Informal discussions

The two leaders came face to face for the first time after their armies were involved in a face-off in the Doklam area in the Sikkim sector, that has heightened tensions between the two countries, including war-mongering by the Chinese media.

Modi and Xi discuss issues at BRICS meeting

Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi, President of China Xi Jinping, and President of Russia Vladimir Putin arriving to attend a meeting of BRICS leaders within the G20 Leaders' Summit in Hamburg, yesterday.

Rivers are not living entities: CourtNew Delhi

AFP

India's sacred Ganges and Yamuna rivers cannot be considered "living entities",

the country's top court ruled yesterday, suspending an ear-lier order that granted them the same legal rights as humans.

The Supreme Court stayed a March order by a lower body that recognised the Ganges and its tributary the Yamuna as "legal persons" in an attempt to protect the highly polluted rivers from further degradation.

The landmark ruling made polluting or damaging the rivers legally comparable to hurting a person, and saw three top government officials appointed as custodians. But the Himalayan state of Uttra-khand, where the Ganges originates, petitioned the top court arguing the legal status to the venerated rivers was "unsustainable in the law".

In its plea, the state said the ruling was unclear on

whether the custodians or the state government was liable to pay damages to those who drown during floods, in case they file damage suits.

Petitioner Mohammad Saleem, on whose plea the Uttrakhand High Court bestowed the legal rights to the water bodies, will have the opportunity to appeal the rul-ing by a bench headed by chief justice J S Khehar.

M C Pant, Saleem's law-yer, said he was "shocked and surprised" over the govern-ment's decision to oppose the status. "We will present our case before the court and con-vince them," Pant said.

The Ganges is India's long-est and holiest river, but the waters in which pilgrims rit-ualistically bathe and scatter the ashes of their dead is heavily polluted with untreated sewage and indus-trial waste. Successive governments in India have attempted with limited suc-cess to clean up the Ganges, which snakes 2,500km.

NEWS BYTES

PATNA: The CBI yesterday carried out raids at the residences of RJD leader Lalu Prasad, his wife Rabri and son Tejashwi Yadav, who is Bihar's Deputy Chief Minister, for allegedly receiving a three-acre plot of land as a pay-off in leasing two railway hotels to a private company when he was the Rail-ways Minister. Lalu Prasad denied the charges and dubbed the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) raids a political conspir-acy done at the behest of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led central government. Scores of CBI sleuths searched at least a dozen locations in Delhi, Gurugram, Patna, Ranchi and Bhu-baneswar. CBI Additional Director Rakesh Asthana said that Lalu Prasad had illegally favoured Sujata Hotels through the Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) when he was Railways Minister from 2004 to 2009. Asthana said the tender for the development, maintenance and oper-ation of BNR Hotels in Ranchi and Puri was "rigged" to favour Sujata Hotels in exchange for 10 plots comprising three-acres in Patna's Shaguna More area. The case, he said, was regis-tered on July 5 for "criminal conspiracy, cheating and criminal misconduct". "Three acres of land in western Patna was trans-ferred by Delight Marketing Company Pvt Ltd that is known to the Yadav family," he said, adding that between 2010 and 2014 this land was transferred at a very low cost to Lara Projects.

RAIGAD : Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis escaped a potential accident yesterday when his helicopter took off suddenly as he was about to board it in Raigad dis-trict, a top official said. According to Raigad's acting Collector P.D. Malikner, the incident happened around 1.50 pm when Fadnavis came to the JSW Steel Company's helipad in Alibaug and was preparing to board the waiting helicopter. "As the CM came near the door, the chopper suddenly took off, tilted side-ways and hovered around 2-3 feet in the air... its rotating wings came very close to his head," Malikner told IANS from the site. However, an alert security personnel acted swiftly, lunging for-ward to save the CM from any injury, Malikner added.

MUMBAI : Amid controversy over beef ban and lynchings by cow vigilantes, a Maharashtra forensic laboratory will develop and provide to police kits to detect beef or otherwise, officials said yesterday. "These kits can detect meat proteins in a sam-ple and provide test results within half an hour. If the report is positive that a sample is cow meat, it will then be sent for fur-ther forensic testing for confirmation through DNA process," said Deputy Director K Y Kulkarni of the premier Forensics Sci-ence Laboratory at Kalina in Mumbai. The lab will design and develop these portable kits, each expected to cost around Rs 8,000, for the police forces. A total of 45 such kits are likely to be given to Mumbai police in August in the first round.

NEW DELHI : The Supreme Court yesterday ordered a halt to further counselling and admissions to IITs in respect of entrance tests under JEE-Advanced across the country. "No counselling or admission to the seats in ITT JEE-Advanced shall take place until further orders," said the bench of Justice Dipak Misra and Justice A.M.Khanwilkar as it directed the further hearing of the matter on July 10. The court's order came on petitions by two candidates who have challenged the grant of seven marks to all the candidates for errors in two questions - one in chem-istry and other in maths - in the Hindi version of the paper. While the chemistry question carried three marks, the maths question was of four marks.

CBI raids at Lalu Prasad Yadav's premises

Fadnavis escapes copter accident

Mumbai lab to make beef test kits

Apex court halts IIT admissions

SC for preventive policy on farmers distress

Members of the OBC Ekta Manch participating in a protest rally to waive the debt of farmers and against the increase of the cost for milk producers, in Ahmedabad, yesterday.

New Delhi IANS

Observing that no coercive steps be taken for the recovery of loan dues

from farmers in distress, the Supreme Court yesterday advo-cated preventive rather than compensatory approach to deal with suicides by farmers.

The apex court said any pol-icy to address the issue could not be tagged with commercial or business considerations. Crop

insurance can't be business and commercial oriented, a bench of Justice Dipak Misra and Justice A M. Khanwilkar said and won-dered "how could a farmer pay 30 per cent premium for crop insurance".

Saying that it was for the government to address the sit-uation and that no coercive steps be taken for loan recov-ery from farmers in distress, the bench sought a response from authorities on eliminating mid-dlemen from marketing of

agriculture produce. The court was hearing a PIL

by the Tamil Nadu Centre for Public Interest Litigation to draw the apex court's attention to suicides of farmers in the southern state and need for remedial steps.

Amicus curiae Gopal Shankarnarayan told the bench that the biggest problem for farmers was to sell their agri-cultural produce and there was also a problem of last-mile connectivity.

Mumbai steps up removal of British names from railwayMumbai

AFP

Indian authorities are mov-ing to strip Mumbai's railway stations of their

British names, an official said yesterday, as leaders seek to purge the city of remnants of its colonial past.

Elphinstone Road station — named after a British-era governor —officially became Prabhadevi station this week, after a local Hindu deity, and ministers say more changes are in the works.

"We are working to rename railway stations as per locally known names instead of older names," Diwakar Raote, transport minister for the Maharashtra state govern-ment, said. Raote is a member of Shiv Sena, a local Hindu nationalist party which pushed through the renaming of Bombay to the local Mar-athi name Mumbai in 1995.

05SATURDAY 8 JULY 2017 ASIA

Supporters of the Islamic charity organisation Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) holding a picture of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Muzaffar Wani and national flags during a demonstration in Faisalabad, in Pakistan, yesterday.

Burhan Wani remembered

Duterte likely to extend martial law in MarawiManila

Reuters

President Rodrigo Duterte said yesterday he will likely extend 60 days of martial law he imposed in the

southern Philippines to deal with a deadly siege of a city by mili-tants allied with the Islamic State group because the situation remains critical.

Duterte said he would only lift martial rule, which is to expire in about two weeks, if the military and police tell him the danger posed by the militants has abated. The Supreme Court upheld his martial law declara-tion on Tuesday in a legal boost to the military offensive he ordered to quell the Marawi city siege.

Duterte has said the offen-sive is winding down and could end soon in Marawi, which was attacked by hundreds of gunmen waving IS-style black flags on May 23. But scores of gunmen are still holding hostages and con-tinuing to fight in four areas of the lakeside city, a bastion of the Islamic faith in the south.

Asked if he plans to lift

martial law this month, Duterte said he consulted the military and police and was told the sit-uation remains critical. He said he would rely on their advice because "they are the ones keep-ing this republic healthy and alive."

"If they say there is no more danger and everything is OK,

then that is the time that we will lift martial law," Duterte said.

Carrying an assault rifle and wearing a military camouflage uniform, Duterte attempted but failed to fly to Marawi to visit troops yesterday due to bad weather. It was his second aborted trip to the predomi-nantly Islamic city, large areas of which resemble a smoldering war zone amid intense fighting and military airstrikes.

"I should show my face there," Duterte said, adding he wants to visit during the fighting to demonstrate his desire "to protect the republic."

Security officials hope the crisis will end before Duterte delivers his annual state of the nation address on July 24, but Defense Secretary Delfin Loren-zana has said he will let commanders set the pace of the battle to avoid adding pressure that could endanger troops.

More than 350 militants, 87 soldiers and police and 39 civil-ians have been killed in 46 days of fighting, alarming Southeast Asian and Western governments, which fear that the Islamic State group's rule in Syria and Iraq, now collapsing, may have

galvanized Asian militants into attempting to create their own so-called Islamic caliphate.

The United States and Aus-tralia have deployed surveillance planes to Marawi to help Filipino troops locate the remaining mil-itants holed up in buildings and houses.

Nearly 400,000 residents have abandoned Marawi and outlying towns in Lanao del Sur province, about 800 kilometers (500 miles) southeast of Manila.

Meanwhile, Duterte said

members of other Muslim sepa-ratist groups, some of which are involved in peace talks with the government, may "have started initiatives" to hold talks with the militants in Marawi but it was "impossible" that any attempt was made by him.

"Many of my soldiers and policemen have been killed. If there has to be peace it would really be peace. Don't play with me. Let us finish this once and for all," Duterte said.

A prominent Muslim leader

told Reuters earlier that Duterte had been preparing to make a deal with the militants in the days after they began their assault but dropped the plan without explanation. Agakhan Sharief, an intermediary involved in the process,said he was approached by a senior Duterte aide to use his connec-tions with the Maute group's leaders to start back-channel talks. Lorenzana said he did not know about any back-channel efforts.

Bangkok

AFP

Thai officials have filed criminal charges against a news website for

branding the popular beach destination of Koh Tao "Death Island" in reports about a string of murky tourist fatali-ties. Koh Tao's reputation as a tropical paradise was first sul-lied in 2014 when two British backpackers were brutally murdered on one of its white-sand beaches.

A series of other foreign tourist deaths have fuelled press coverage about the island's 'dark side,' with alle-gations of local mafia and corrupt police colluding to cover up murders.

The latest case to raise suspicions was the death of a Belgian woman in April, which police ruled was a sui-cide. Local online outlet Samui Times ran an article last month that questioned the police account and referred to Koh Tao as "Death Island".

Lahore

Internews

Technical Education and Vocational Training Authority (TEVTA) Chair-

man Irfan Qaiser Sheikh has said Asian Development Bank (ADB) will provide a loan of $50-70 million to the graduates of the vocational institute to help start their own businesses.

The TEVTA chairman said this after the visit of an ABD del-egation on Wednesday. The five-member delegation of ADB visited the TEVTA secretariat and institute. The delegation visited the class rooms of Chi-nese language, IT, mobile repairing, hospitality and others.

It comprised of Adviser to Vice President ADB Chen Chen, Country Director PRM Zaihong Yang, Principal Education Spe-cialist Norman LaRocque, economist Farzana Noshab and Social Sector Specialist Munir Abro.

Irfan said the ADB would provide a loan of $50-70 mil-lion on relaxed conditions with which TEVTA would facilitate its graduates so that they could start their own businesses. He also announced that all TEVTA institutes would be converted to solar energy technology.

Panic and damage after deadly Philippine quake

Thai officials sue news website

ADB offers loans to Pakistani graduates

Islamabad

Reuters

A senior Facebook official met with Pakistan’s inte-rior minister yesterday to

discuss a demand the company prevent blasphemous content or be blocked.

The meeting comes after a Pakistani counter-terrorism court sentenced a 30-year-old man to death for making blas-phemous comments on

Facebook, part of a wider crack-down. Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of public policy, met Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan, who offered to approve a Facebook office in Pakistan, which has 33 million users of the network. Khan said Pakistan believes in freedom of expres-sion, but that does not include insulting Islam or stoking reli-gious tensions.

“We cannot allow anyone to misuse social media for hurting

religious sentiments,” Khan said.Facebook called the meet-

ing “constructive”.“Facebook met with Paki-

stan officials to express the company’s deep commitment to protecting the rights of the peo-ple who use its service, and to enabling people to express themselves freely and safely,” the company said in an email.

“It was an important and constructive meeting in which we raised our concerns over the

recent court cases and made it clear we apply a strict legal proc-ess to any government request for data or content restrictions.”

Pakistan’s social media crack-down is officially aimed at weeding out blasphemy and shutting down accounts promot-ing terrorism, but civil rights activists say it has also swept up writers and bloggers who criti-cise the government or military.

Manila

AFP

Residents fled their houses in panic overnight yester-day as aftershocks hit the

central Philippines a day after a 6.5-magnitude earthquake killed two people and injured at least 72 others, authorities said. Rescuers pulled out 13 trapped people from a collapsed com-mercial building late Thursday in the town of Kananga on Leyte island, near the epicentre of the quake, local officials said.

Three provinces in the region remain without power while all schools are closed in Leyte as authorities assess the damage. "Some residents ran out of their homes when they felt aftershocks. Some had

panicked but many stayed calm because we just had an earth-quake drill and they know what to do in times of disaster," Office of Civil Defense regional spokesperson Pebbles Lluz said.

The two fatalities were an 18-year-old woman who was hit by falling debris in Ormoc City in Leyte, while one body was retrieved from the col-lapsed building in Kananga.

The earthquake also dam-aged houses and schools, left cracks in highways and caused landslides, authorities said.

Geothermal plants in Leyte, its main source of power, were also hit according to the pro-vincial government. Local airlines have meanwhile can-celled flights to Ormoc City on Leyte island.

UNHCR chief urges Myanmar to grant Rohingya citizenshipBangkok

Reuters

The head of the U.N. refugee agency urged Myanmar yesterday to grant citizen-

ship to the Rohingya, a stateless Muslim minority in the Asian country where sectarian violence has displaced tens of thousands since 2012.

On his first official visit to Southeast Asia, U.N. High Com-missioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi this week met communi-ties in the towns of Sittwe and Maungdaw in Myanmar’s

Rakhine state, home to a large population of Rohingya Muslims.

He also met Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s de facto leader.

Rakhine State in west Myan-mar has seen the most serious religious violence in predomi-nantly Buddhist Myanmar since the military began to end its dec-ades of strict rule, with hundreds of Rohingya Muslims killed and more than 140,000 people dis-placed there in communal unrest in 2012.

Tensions have risen again in recent days after village

administrators were murdered and troops killed three people while clearing a Rohingya mili-tant camp.

“It’s important to work on granting citizenship to the Mus-lim community, that has been deprived of citizenship for many years,” Grandi told reporters in Bangkok. Myanmar’s govern-ment regards the approximately one million Rohingya as illegal migrants from neighbouring Bangladesh and denies them cit-izenship, even though Rohingya families have lived there for generations.

Grandi also said that more investment was needed in the region.

“It is one of the poorest states in the Union of Myanmar and there’s an urgent need for devel-opment investments that must be inclusive of the two commu-nities,” he said.

Last October, Rohingya insurgents launched deadly attacked on Myanmar guard posts near the Bangladesh bor-der, provoking a military crackdown in which the United Nations says hundreds were killed, more than 1,000 homes

burned and some 75,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh.

The United Nations has established a fact-finding mis-sion to investigate crimes against humanity allegedly committed by Myanmar’s military during the counter-offensive.

Suu Kyi’s administration has rejected the allegations and opposes the mission.

In the latest unrest in the region, a Rohingya Muslim man was killed and six wounded when they were attacked by a mob of Rakhine Buddhists this week.

Critical situation

Duterte said he would only lift martial rule, which is to expire in about two weeks, if the military and police tell him the danger posed by the militants has abated.

Duterte has said the offensive is winding down and could end soon in Marawi, which was attacked by hundreds of gunmen waving IS-style black flags on May 23.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte wearing a military uniform while walking inside a military camp in Iligan City, on the southern island of Mindanao, yesterday.

FB official meets minister after blasphemy sentence

06 SATURDAY 8 JULY 2017EUROPE

Ivana Kupala holiday

Fraud: French minister faces financial probeParis

Reuters

FR ENCH prosecutors launched an investigation yes-terday into suspected financial misdemeanours by a French state body when it was led by a woman who is now a min-ister in President Emmanuel Macron's government.

Labour Minister Muriel Penicaud is not cited as the target of the probe into the way a party promoting France at a consumer elec-tronics fair in Las Vegas in 2016 was organised.

Macron won power in May promising to rid politics of corruption and conflicts of interest. Several members of his government have bowed out following media scrutiny of funding investigations in which their names have cropped up.

The invest igat ion announced concerns a party for Business France at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, where Macron himself was present in his role as economy minister.

There was no open ten-der to organise the event and the party was put together by the Havas public relations agency. Havas has said it had an 18-month contract with the state agency which allowed for it to do the job without the need for a public tender.

Penicaud, head of Business France at the time, said she was the one who raised the alarm when an audit exposed a potential problem.

Paris relocates 2,771 migrantsLithuania jails Russian spy to ten yearsVilnius

AFP

A Lithuanian court yesterday sentenced a Russian security official to 10 years in prison for spying after prosecutors accused him of attempting to bug the president's home.

The ruling could further heighten tensions between the Nato member and Mos-cow after relations hit their lowest level in recent years over Russian intervention in Ukraine.

Judge Regina Pociene said the handcuffed Nikolai Filip-chenko "worked for the Russian federal security serv-ice (FSB) whose activities include intelligence outside of the Russian Federation."

She added that the 40-year-old used forged doc-uments to conceal his real identity and had repeatedly crossed the border illegally.

Filipchenko's lawyer Galina Kardanovskaja said he "disagrees with the charges" but it was "too early to say" if he would appeal the verdict.

She added that Russian diplomats were providing her client with some money and literature.

Paris

Reuters

French police took thou-sands of migrants living in tents on the pavements of northern Paris to temporary

lodgings in and around the city yesterday.

"They loaded 2,771 people, including dozens of unaccom-panied children into vans and coaches at dawn," Interior Min-ister Gerard Collomb said, noting that the government was deter-mined to prevent a proliferation of makeshift, illegal camps.

"These illegal camps present a security and public health risk for both the occupants and local residents," the Paris police pre-fect's office said in a statement as 350 police and other officials conducted the clear-out.

"As people continue to cross into Europe from Africa and the Middle East in their thousands, about 100 migrants a day have been arriving in the Porte de la Chapelle area of northern Paris," Paris City Hall official Domin-ique Versini said.

Local authorities have also reported a rise in the number of migrants roaming the streets of the northern port city of Calais,

where a sprawling camp was razed last November and its inhabitants sent to other parts of France.

Calais, from which migrants hope to reach Britain, has come to symbolise Europe's difficulty in dealing with a record influx of men, women and children flee-ing conflict and poverty at home.

"France must respond to this unprecedented migration crisis

in Europe humanely and firmly," Collomb said in a statement.

He said this week the situa-tion was getting out of hand despite, or perhaps because of the magnet-effect of, the open-ing of refugee reception centres by Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo.

."It's always the same prob-lem," Collomb said on Thursday. "First off you say 'I'm going to open a centre for 500 people' and next thing you know you have 3,000 or 4,000 people and you're left having to sort the problem out."

French president Emmanuel Macron has asked Collomb to produce plans to process asylum requests more rapidly so that the authorities can say within a max-imum of six months who is granted refugee status and who is deported.

Cyprus reunification talks fail to reach dealCrans-Montana

AFP

Marathon talks aimed at ending Cyprus's drawn-out conflict collapsed

early yesterday without a deal, despite an 11th-hour bid by the UN chief to rescue them.

Cyprus is one of the world's longest-running political crises and the UN-backed talks that began in the Swiss Alpine resort of Crans-Montana on June 28 had been billed as the best chance to end the island's 40-year division.

The failure to reach a deal brings an end to more than two

years of UN-backed efforts to resolve the conflict.

"I am deeply sorry to inform you that despite the very strong commitment and engagement of all the delegations and the different parties... the Confer-ence on Cyprus was closed without an agreement being reached," UN Secretary-Gen-eral Antonio Guterres said yesterday.

Cyprus has been divided since 1974 when Turkish troops invaded and later occupied its northern third in response to an Athens-inspired putsch seek-ing union with Greece.

Guterres was upbeat when

he first joined Crans-Montana talks late last week, describing the negotiations as "highly con-structive", and urging the rival Cypriot sides to seize "a historic opportunity to reach a compre-hensive settlement to the conflict that has divided Cyprus for too many decades".

But the tone quickly soured and the UN chief flew back to Switzerland early Thursday in a bid to try to end the stalemate that had set in.

He held a full day of back-to-back meetings with President Nicos Anastasiades, the Greek-Cypriot leader, and his Turkish-Cypriot counterpart

Mustafa Akinci, as well as the foreign and European affairs ministers from so-called guar-antor powers Greece, Turkey and Britain.

But after pushing negotia-tions into yesterday, just hours before he was set to leave for the G20 summit in Hamburg, a drawn-looking Guterres was forced to acknowledge that the talks ended "without a result".

Shortly before his announcement, a source close to the negotiations said the talks had become heated: "There was people yelling, a lot of emotions."

Guterres, who had

previously said the conference would be "open-ended", said it had become clear there was no point continuing.

"It was obvious that there was still a significant distance between the delegations on a certain number of issues, and a deal was not possible," he said.

"Unfortunately, no break-through was made... due to the insistence of the Turkish side to continue with... the Turkish intervention rights in Cyprus as well as the illegal presence of Turkish troops on the island," said Cyprus government s p o k e s p e r s o n N i k o s Christodoulides.

Austria plans to replace Eurofighter jet systemVienna

Reuters

Austria plans to end its Eurofighter jet pro-gramme early and

replace it with a cheaper alter-native fleet of aircraft bought or leased from another govern-ment, its defence minister said yesterday, amid a legal battle over the jets with Airbus.

Austria sued Airbus and the Eurofighter consortium, includ-ing Britain's BAE Systems and Italy's Leonardo, in February, alleging deception and fraud linked to a near $2.3bn jet order in 2003.

Airbus and the consortium have denied the accusations.

The charges were the latest in a series of rows between Austria and the consortium, which have sparked two par-liamentary inquiries and resulted in Airbus boss Tom Enders being investigated by Vienna prosecutors.

The defence ministry said in a statement that Austria's 15 Eurofighter jets could be phased out from 2020.

The continued use of the Eurofighter planes for 30 years - the normal life span of such jets - would cost up to 5 billion euros, largely for maintenance.

Buying and operating a new fleet comprised of 15 single-seater and three twin-seater

supersonic jets over the same period could be 2 billion euros cheaper than continuing its cur-rent programme, the ministry added.

"It is necessary to get a grip on the overflowing costs of the Eurofighter," Defence Minister Hans Peter Doskozil said.

A source at the ministry was confident existing maintenance contracts with Airbus for the Eurofighters could be renegotiated.

Doskozil said some kind of compensation for its Eurofight-ers was "likely" to come from the court battle.

Alternatively, the aircraft or parts could be sold.

Airbus and Eurofighter said in emailed statements: "it is not for us to comment" on Austrian defence procurement discus-sions, adding the Eurofighter "works very well for all other customers".

Doskozil said the plan had nothing to do with campaign-ing ahead of Austrian elections in October and that he expected it to go ahead even if there was a change in government.

The defence ministry said it had already been in touch with other governments, air forces and aircraft producers.

It prefers a government-to-government deal that would see Vienna lease or buy aircraft from another country.

One dead as twin blasts rock Lugansk CityDonetsk

AFP

Two explosions rocked the city of Lugansk in Ukraine's insurgent-run

east yesterday, killing one per-son and injuring seven, said officials, considering them "acts of terror".

Lugansk is the main city of one of the two rebel-controlled areas in eastern Ukraine where

violence has been uninterrupted since a pro-Russian separatist uprising in spring 2014.

The first explosion occurred around 12:30GMT in the city centre, said Alina Zhivolup, spokeswoman for the commu-nications ministry of the self-proclaimed Lugansk Peo-ple's Republic.

"One woman died and five people were wounded and taken to hospital," she said.

A second blast "from an explosive device" went off nearby about an hour later, she added, injuring two more people.

"We consider both explo-sions acts of terror that were set off with the idea of causing a large amount of casualties among civilians," police spokes-man Andrei Marochko said, blaming the blasts on Kiev.

The conflict between the

separatists and Kiev forces has already killed over 10,000 peo-ple and clashes continue across the frontline despite a number of ceasefires.

Kiev and the West accuse Russia of stirring up the conflict and sending troops and weap-onry across the border.

Moscow denies the accusa-tions, saying only that off-duty soldiers and volunteers have gone to fight in Ukraine.

Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said that police loaded 2,771 people, including dozens of unaccompanied children into vans and coaches, noting that the government was determined to prevent a proliferation of makeshift, illegal camps.

Illegal camps

Local authorities have also reported a rise in the number of migrants roaming the streets of the northern port city of Calais.

Women make wreaths during a celebration on the traditional Ivana Kupala (Ivan the Bather) holiday, in Kiev, Ukraine.

Anti-riot police CRS officers stand guard in front of migrants and refugees during the evacuation of a makeshift camp at Porte de la Chapelle, northern in Paris, yesterday.

07SATURDAY 8 JULY 2017 EUROPE

G20 Summit kicks off in HamburgHamburg

AP

German Chancellor Angela Merkel told leaders of the Group of 20 economic pow-ers yesterday that

millions of people are hoping they can help solve the world's problems, and warned them that they must be prepared to make compromises. As the leaders dis-cussed terrorism, trade and climate change, protests against their gathering continued in var-ious parts of Hamburg.

Anti-globalisation activists set dozens of cars ablaze and protesters tried unsuccessfully to block leaders' delegations from getting to the downtown convention center where the summit is being held.

Police ordered in several hundred more officers from across the country yesterday.

Inside the security cordon, Merkel's prospects of finding

common ground issues such as climate change and multilateral trade looked uncertain at Pres-ident Donald Trump's first G-20 summit.

Trump's "America First" rhetoric and decision to with-draw from the Paris accord against climate change have caused widespread concern in Europe and beyond.

"There are of course millions of people following us with their concerns, their fears and their needs, who hope that we can make a contribution to solving the problems," Merkel told fel-low leaders at the start of a working lunch at which they were to discuss global growth and trade.

"I am absolutely sure that everyone will make an effort to achieve good results".

"We all know the big global challenges, and we know that time is pressing," Merkel said yesterday.

"So solutions can only be found if we are prepared to com-promise ... without, and I say this clearly, bending ourselves too much out of shape. We can of course also name differences," she added.

The German chancellor noted that the countries at the summit represent two-thirds of the world population, four-fifths of the globe's gross domestic

product and three-quarters of world trade.

The G-20 comprises Argen-tina, Australia, Brazil, China, Germany, France, Britain, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Canada, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Tur-key, the United States and the European Union.

Also attending the summit are the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Guinea, Senegal, Singa-pore and Vietnam.

Before the summit, the lead-ers of China, India, Russia, Brazil and South Africa met and called for a more open global economy.

In a statement following their meeting, the so-called BRICS nations voiced support for a "rules-based, transparent, non-discriminatory, open and inclusive multilateral trading system" and emphasised the need for increasing "the voice and representation" of emerg-ing markets and developing

countries in global economic and financial institutions.

Speaking at the meeting, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke against global trade restrictions, saying that financial sanctions on a political pretext hurt mutual confidence and damage the global economy — an apparent reference to Western sanctions against Russia.

The BRICS leaders also urged the international community to work jointly to implement the Paris climate agreement.

The summit, at which Trump was holding his first meeting with Putin, follows skirmishes on Thursday evening between police and protesters at a dem-onstration in Germany's second-biggest city that was expected to be the largest flash-point around the summit.

Police said that at least 111 officers were hurt during those clashes, one of whom had to be taken to a hospital with an eye

injury after a firework exploded in front of him.

Twenty-nine people were arrested and another 15 tempo-rarily detained.

On Friday, there were fur-ther incidents but nothing as intense as Thursday's skirmishes.

Dozens of officers built mov-ing lines in different parts of Hamburg and used water can-nons to force away protesters from streets across the city.

Some were physically moved for hundreds of metres (yards) from a protest sit-in in front of the first security checkpoint near the summit grounds.

None of the activists man-aged to push into the no-go zone around the summit that the police had established.

The city has boosted its police with reinforcements from around the country and has 20,000 officers on hand to patrol Hamburg's streets, skies and waterways.

Italy must admit 'fixed number' of migrants: RenziRome

AFP

FORMER Italian prime min-ister Matteo Renzi, the head of the ruling Democratic Party, yesterday said Italy should allow only a "fixed number" of migrants into the country as it grapples with a wave of people arriving by sea from North Africa.

"There has to be a fixed number of arrivals. We should not feel guilty if we are not able to welcome everyone," Renzi said in a video posted on his party's website.

"We have to save every-one, but we are not able to welcome everyone into Italy."

Italy has been struggling to cope with a flood of migrants crossing the Medi-terranean Sea from Libya, a journey that has so far claimed more than 2,200 lives this year, UN figures show.

According to the Interna-tional Organization for Migration (IOM), the country has accepted around 85,000 of the 100,000 people who have arrived this year -- an influx that has revived fears of a return to the EU's migrant crisis of 2015, when hundreds of thousands of people arrived on the continent.

The massive wave has also exacerbated tensions with Austria, which this week threatened to send troops to its border with Italy to stop migrants entering.

8 missing in Naples building collapseRome

AFP

Rescuers were using their bare hands to comb through the rubble look-

ing for eight people missing after an apartment block collapsed yesterday near the Italian city of Naples, firefighters said.

Two floors of the small four-storey block in the town of Torre Annunziata, at the foot of the volcano Mount Vesuvius, col-lapsed at around 6.30 in the morning.

Media reports said neigh-bours had heard no explosion

-- just the crash when the build-ing collapsed.

Witnesses said a freight train had passed on the neighbour-ing railway track just before the building collapsed, while others noted that renovation works had been under way on the lower floors.

Prosecutors in Torre Annun-ziata have opened an investigation to determine what caused the accident.

Some 30 firefighters, joined by dozens of volunteers and rel-atives of the missing, were searching the wreckage for sur-vivors in the scorching heat.

The fire service said two officers had been lightly injured during search operations.

Local mayor Vincenzo Ascione said the missing were a couple and their children aged eight and 11, another couple and their 25-year-old son, and a 65-year-old woman who lived alone.

The rescuers were stopping regularly, hoping to hear calls for help. Sniffer dogs were also on site to help locate the missing.

Train traffic on the adjacent railway track was halted as a safety precaution.

Dutch govt blocks Turkey minister's visitThe Hague

AFP

The Dutch government yesterday expressed opposition to plans by

Turkey's Deputy Prime Min-ister Tugrul Turkes to visit The Netherlands to address a gathering marking last year's failed military coup.

"A visit by the Turkish deputy prime minister or any member of the Turkish gov-ernment is undesirable, given the current situation regard-ing bilateral relations between our two countries," the cabinet said in a statement.

Dutch tabloid Algemeen Dagblad had on Thursday reported that Turkes planned to address a rally in the east-ern city of Apeldoorn next week to mark the abortive coup of July 15 last year.

The meeting was organ-ised by the Union of European Turkish Democrats which is affiliated to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's rul-ing AK party, the Dutch government said.

"This in principle is not about stopping the meeting... but the decision is a logical step following the incidents in March," said the statement, which also condemned attempted coup as an "attack on Turkish democratic institutions".

Dutch-Turkish relations

hit an all-time low after The Netherlands expelled a Turk-ish minister on March 11 when she defied a ban on attend-ing a campaign rally among expats ahead of an April ref-erendum which expanded Erdogan's powers.

Another minister's plane was blocked from landing.

The two ministers wanted to address Dutch-Turkish cit-izens at a time when The Netherlands itself was gear-ing up for major national elections to be held a few days later.

Protests erupted in the harbour city of Rotterdam as Family Minister Fatma Betul Sayan Kaya was escorted out of The Netherlands, with riot police eventually moving in to break up the demonstra-tion, using dogs, horses and water cannon.

There are of course millions of people following us with their concerns, their fears and their needs, who hope that we can make a contribution to solving the problems. I am absolutely sure that everyone will make an effort to achieve good results: Merkel

World issues

Firefighters search the rubble after two floors collapsed in a small four-storey building in Torre Annunziata, in a town near the Italian city of Naples, yesterday.

"A visit by the Turkish deputy prime minister or any member of the Turkish government is undesirable, given the current situation regarding bilateral relations between our two countries," the cabinet said in a statement.

LEFT: German Chancellor Angela Merkel, China's President Xi Jinping, US President Donald Trump, Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May and Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the start of the first working session of the G20 meeting in Hamburg, northern Germany, yesterday. RIGHT: Riot police use water cannon against protesters.

08 SATURDAY 8 JULY 2017VIEWS

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

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Should the US introduce tariffs on European steelimports, Europe is ready to react immediately and adequately.

Jean-Claude Juncker European Commission President

A flurry of diplomacy this week marks the first possible turning point in the five-week-old standoff between a defiant Qatar and four Saudi Arabia-led Arab

states that have tried to bring it to its knees, accusing it of promoting terrorism and threatening their security. While accusa-tions and denials continue to fly around, we may be facing a turning point towards a possible negotiated diplomatic resolution that satisfies the legitimate minimum demands of both sides - if all concerned respond maturely to the new positive developments.

The heart of this possible shift is a list of six “principles” issued on Thursday by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, and Egypt, which address in broad and universally acceptable terms the same concerns of regional security and stability that had prompted the initial assault on Qatar in early June. These six principles seem to replace for now the 13 “non-negoti-able demands” on Qatar that it had squarely rejected in any case, and that had found vir-tually zero support among any other major countries.

This is significant because the six broad principles clearly can be supported by Qatar and all its Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) partners, once the details are clarified and negotiated quietly. This would reverse the boisterous, aggressive, and defiant tones that defined the past five weeks of public sparring, while a seemingly detached United States watched from the sidelines and also sent conflicting signals.

Three trends that peaked last week may have pushed the feuding parties towards a possible new path to resolution. The Qataris showed that they could and would resist both the siege and the unreasonable demands from their GCC neighbours, for years if need be, and many important coun-tries supported them.

The Saudi-led group pressuring Qatar found themselves almost totally isolated internationally, with nothing to show for their previous month of aggressive demands on Qatar.

They probably realised that any new sanctions they imposed would only backfire on them politically and economically, and tarnish their reputation globally as reliable partners. And the United States engaged more directly and clearly for a negotiated resolution of the feud, following weeks of mixed signals and seemingly detached American reactions to what Washington initially described as an in-house feud within the GCC; strong European support for a negotiated solution also reinforced the US position.

The announcement on Thursday that US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson would fly to Kuwait on Monday - the formal mediator in this issue - followed the German Foreign

The turning point of the GCC crisisRami G Khouri Al Jazeera

Minister’s statement that Qatar would allow German experts to inspect Qatari financial accounts to investigate any credible allegations of support for “terrorist” groups. These developments coincided with statements at a private conference in Washington, DC on Thursday by former US officials who handled ter-ror financing probes that several countries in the GCC seem to have allowed their citizens to fund extremist groups or other designated “terrorists”.

The accelerated direct involve-ment of the US, Germany, and other foreign powers in resolving this dis-pute is a critical component of the diplomatic process - but the interests of regional powers such as Iran and Turkey that have come to Qatar’s assistance in riding out the Saudi-Emirati-led failed siege should also be taken into consideration.

The six principles statement opens the door for Qatar and its GCC erstwhile partners - should they wish - to achieve critical goals that have been sidelined during the past five weeks. They can agree to core principles of promoting mutual security, stability, and sovereignty, while also fighting terrorism, pre-venting cross-border provocations and incitements, and refraining from interfering in the internal affairs of other countries.

The six principles broadly but also specifically respond to the

demands of both sides, as well as the global commitment to fight terror-ism and political violence. They also significantly include references to 2013/14 and 2017 agreements on these issues that all six GCC states had agreed to implement, so all sides could move ahead to a resolution by reaffirming positions they had all already accepted.

How those broad principles are defined in practice will determine whether or not this is indeed an

opening to a new path to resolve this conflict. So, for example, will the Saudi-led side insist that closing Al Jazeera is critical to ending “incite-ment” against one’s neighbours, as they did in their original, and widely ridiculed, demands that Qatar rightly rejected out of hand? Will Qatar negotiate an agreement that com-mits all the GCC states to the same principles as they want it to imple-ment? Do foreign military bases across the entire GCC threaten any one country’s security?

The past five weeks have con-firmed again that unilateral hard demands issued within an aggressive siege of Qatar have no chance of being accepted.

They have also shown that Qatar is willing to comply with interna-tional measures to prevent funding of terrorist groups - inspections, audits, embedded foreign technical experts - but very reasonably it wants those measures to be applied universally across the GCC and other states. Achieving an agreement that sticks will require the same kind of mutual respect and balanced, realis-tic diplomacy that allowed Iran and its international negotiating partners to reach their agreement on nuclear/sanctions issues - because both sides’ concerns were taken into account, and international principles of legitimate or forbidden actions were applied equally to both sides.

Saudi-Emirati-led bravado across the Gulf during the past five weeks unsuccessfully used tough talk and siege measures to force Qatar to comply with the unreasona-ble initial demands. Not only did Qatar refuse to comply; also every important power in the world emphasised its support for a political resolution of the conflict and ending the siege.

An opening now exists for all sides to acknowledge that money and tough talk can never substitute for a rational, principled, and bal-anced discussion of legitimate grievances that are resolved through dialogue and negotiations.

This is a spectacle of many char-acters in the Arab world and abroad, including mature established lead-ers, dysfunctional new leaders, and brash young men who know little about the workings of the world. Let us hope the mature leaders among us prevail, which they now have a chance to do if they follow up dili-gently to build on the six principles that have just been announced.

The writer is senior public pol-icy fellow and professor of journalism at the American Uni-versity of Beirut, an internationally syndicated columnist, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.

The past five weeks have confirmed again that unilateral hard demands issued within an aggressive siege of Qatar have no chance of being accepted.

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

CHAIRMANSHEIKH THANI BIN ABDULLAH AL THANI

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

editorinchief@pen.com.qa

ACTING MANAGING EDITORMOHAMMED SALIM MOHAMED

msalim@pen.com.qa

Much has been written and said about the sudden blockade against Qatar by Saudi-led four Arab countries on June 5, cutting supplies of essentials, that too during the

holy month of Ramadan.Every report by independent media organisations

and analysts has highlighted that the real reasons for the blockade were not the false allegations of terror funding by Qatar, but it was to assert their self-serving political agenda, and safeguarding their economic and commercial interests. However, many in Qatar see this harsh economic blockade (which was essentially designed to sabotage and paralyse the functioning of the economic activities in Doha) as blessing in disguise. Qatar is turning these challenges into opportunities to further accelerate the pace of economic diversification.

Qatar has been working on its industrial diversifi-cation strategy for the past several years, which have already started bearing fruits. Currently, over 60 per-cent of its GDP comes from non-oil and gas sectors. Many, including top government officials and repre-sentatives of private industries, believe that the economic blockade is expected to work as catalyst to achieve self sufficiency.

Qatar’s volume of foreign trade is about QR330bn, and land border entry points accounted for nearly 40 percent of the imported goods, which has now been replaced by sea and air freight.

Private companies from Qatar and other countries are fast establishing joint ventures to produce food and other essentials domestically. This will not only provide market access to new companies, but Qatari citizens and resi-dents will also get better quality products with new tastes.

Qatar’s financial mar-ket has now stabilised after registering some losses during the initial days after the blocked.

The statements issued after the Wednesday’s meeting of the foreign ministers of the blockading countries in Cairo suggest that their move against Qatar has failed terribly. They don’t have any strategy in place, and could not take any further measures that were expected.

Despite investing exhaustive resources, including PR efforts and millions of dollars, they could not con-vince the Western powers to gather support against Qatar to tarnish its reputation. It was a terrible strate-gic miscalculation on the part of Saudi Arabia and its allies.

Analysts believe that the longer the blockade lasts, the weaker will be in its impact, given the fact it vio-lates international laws, the idea of free-trade, free-speech, free-movement of people, which is not in line with the values cherished in the West as well as Qatar.

The leadership in the blockading countries, espe-cially in Saudi Arabia and UAE should also realise that geographically their countries might be bigger, but by that virtue no one get the legitimacy to bully and intim-idate a smaller state.

A blessing in disguise

Private companies from Qatar and other countries are fast establishing joint ventures to produce food and other essentials domestically.

ED ITOR IAL

09SATURDAY 8 JULY 2017 OPINION

attack happened after the local Hindu temple announced on its public address system that a cow had been slaughtered.

The killing of Akhlaq attracted media attention and widespread condemnation from political par-ties except for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). For more than a week Prime Minister Naren-dra Modi kept silent over the incident and even after he spoke about it, he did not condemn it outright. BJP officials kept calling it an accident and a result of the genuine anger of the Hindus over the slaugh-tering of a cow.

Since the murder of Alkhlaq, attacks on Muslims related to cow slaughter or smuggling rumours have increased. In October 2015, amid protests spurred by rumours of cow slaughtering, a truck was attacked with a petrol bomb, killing one Muslim man in Jammu and Kashmir state. In March 2016, two Muslims were killed and hanged in in the tribal state of Jharkahnd after being accused of smuggling cows.

This year, The Indian Express, an English-lan-guage daily, identified seven other incidents between March and May involving lynching of a member of a minority group, four of them instigated by cow vigilantes.

On June 22, three Muslims were killed in West Bengal state after being accused of cow smuggling. On June 27, a Muslim dairy owner in the state of Jharkhand was attacked by a mob after being accused of killing a cow; the man was rushed to a hospital in critical condition after the police man-

Qatar stands up to the neighbourhood bullies

My country, Qatar, is a nation under siege. For the past month, its borders and airline routes have been closed off by a regional bloc consisting of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bah-

rain and Egypt. The authorities in the neighboring Gulf states have forced the repatriation of Qatari citi-zens, regardless of age and health.

The bloc has issued a list of wild accusations against Qatar. They include the hosting of Iran’s Rev-olutionary Guard Corps in our capital, Doha; the funding of the pro-Iranian Lebanese militia organiza-tion Hezbollah; and support for the Islamic State terrorist group. This hardly makes sense since Hez-bollah and the Islamic State are sworn enemies, at war with each other in Syria.

Other claims are equally spurious. Qatar stands accused of supporting the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Yet, until this blockade started, my country partici-pated in the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen and lost soldiers fighting the Houthi rebels. This accusation is an insult to their memory.

The Gulf bloc also came up with a list of pur-ported terrorist groups and individuals whom Qatar supposedly hosts or sponsors. One of them is, in fact, a Yemeni Salafist leader who lives in Riyadh, the Saudi capital. Others named do not live in Qatar and have no connection to Doha.

Just as in 1914, when the Austro-Hungarian gov-ernment came up with a list of impossible and

unjustifiable demands as a pretext to

attack Serbia, so Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Egypt and Bahrain have given my country a demeaning and insulting list of conditions to be met to get this unwarranted siege lifted.

Qatar received no previous notice of these demands. Despite our membership in the Gulf Coop-eration Council, we were never even asked to discuss them. With the expiry of the bloc’s ultimatum, the Saudi alliance is threatening additional sanctions.

Thousands of Qatari citizens have been affected. My own mother was making the pilgrimage in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, when the blockade began; she was forced to return to Doha in a humiliating, inconven-ient way. Given the kingdom’s claim to protect Islam’s holy sites and the visitors to them, this exclu-sion of pilgrims is an offense to the Islamic world.

Among the conditions the bloc is attempting to impose on Qatar is that we close down a number of Qatari news organizations, including the award-win-ning satellite channel Al Jazeera, as well as other London-based outlets. Qatar’s stand is clear: We sup-port the freedom of the press — these outlets have been free to publish content critical of Qatar itself, including about this blockade — and the bloc’s demand that these outlets be closed is unacceptable.

Al Jazeera has achieved international recognition for its reporting in the Middle East, where most other media groups are either slavishly pro-regime or heavily censored. During the Arab Spring, media out-lets in the bloc countries typically showed serene and

peaceful scenes in cities where, in reality, demon-strators were being mowed down by security forces. These countries operated a virtual news blackout against their pro-democracy movements; now they cannot forgive us because their citizens could tune in to Al Jazeera and know the truth.

Today, the talk shows and social media platforms of the state-supported media in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates do their masters’ bidding and call for regime change in Qatar. Some talk-show hosts and their guests have even called for terrorists attacks on Qatari soil. Senior Qatari officials have been subjected to character assassinations and insults. In Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, dissent has been criminalized, and anyone speaking up online for Qatar faces prosecu-tion and up to 15 years in prison.

This campaign has been orchestrated from the top. A Saudi state minister and media adviser to the new crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, said on Twitter that he hoped the Qataris “don’t accept” the demands, and “we’ve only just begun.” Deliberately escalating the tension into an implied threat against our very sovereignty, the Dubai deputy chief of police and general security tweeted, “Qatar has always been a part of the U.A.E. that cannot be taken from it.”

Let’s be clear: Qatar is being punished because conservative actors in the bloc, emboldened by changes in the geopolitical balance in the region, see an opportunity to show people in the Arab world that

Muslims across India marked Eid Al Fitr this year wearing black bands. Jamiat Ulama-i Hind, a leading Muslim reli-gious body, cancelled its

annual Eid celebration, a much-awaited event for the who’s who in New Delhi. The Jamiat and other organisations also called for Muslims to wear black bands during their Eid prayers.

This was the first major show of pro-test by the Muslims of India to express their anguish and anger at the continuing violent attacks on members of the their community across India. The day before Eid, 15-year-old Junaid Khan lost his life after being attacked by fellow passengers on a train. He was mocked for being Mus-lim and a “beef-eater” and was knifed to death. Mob violence has threatened not just the Muslim community but also other minorities. In 2016, seven members of a Dalit family were attacked by cow vigilan-tes in the state of Gujarat, which led to mass protests by the Dalit community. Attacks on Christians remain under-reported, but incidents involving churches and priests accused of converting Hindus to Christianity continue.

The media has come to call these inci-dents “mob lynching”, a term that misrepresents what is really going on in India. The spate of violent attacks are in no way spontaneous expressions of mob anger. They are the product of systematic incitement to violence by Hindu national-ists. One of the first major cases to be prominently covered by the media in recent years was the 2015 murder of 52-year-old Mohammad Akhlaq. An angry mob accusing Akhlaq of eating beef dragged him out of his home in Bishara, a village near the city of Dadri in the state of Uttar Pradesh, and beat him to death. The

India’s mob lynching epidemic

Residents commenting on a wall bearing a portrait of Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, which has become the symbol of Qatari resistance during the month-long row between Doha and neighbouring countries, in Doha, yesterday.

aged to save him from his attackers.When I say that mob lynching is not an apt description of

such violence, I seek to underline the organisation behind most of these incidents. They usually appear to be sporadic in nature and often a spontaneous reaction of Hindus who are generally angry over the reports of cow smuggling and slaughter.

But these cases would not have been so frequent if it weren’t for the atmosphere of hate and suspicion against Muslims, created through a sustained political campaign. Engaging in “meat politics” and calling for cow protection have been a favourite tool for many Hindu nationalist politi-cians. Even the Prime Minister Narendra Modi has indulged in its use.

This atmosphere of sustained hatred against Muslims makes attacks on them seem spontaneous and the product of mob anger. But few question why the mob is angry in the first place. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist organisation affiliated with the BJP, has also had a role to play in whipping up nationalist Hindu sentiments and encouraging, even if indirectly, cow vigilantism. Other Hindu nationalist organisations such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), loosely associated with the RSS, have gone further and declared: “Cow protectors are protectors. How can they be killers? Killers cannot be protectors.” The RSS never con-demns or distances itself from the VHP; neither does the BJP.

Hinduisation of public spaces also helps to mobilise soli-darity for groups targeting minority communities. Small groups signing religious or devotional songs or distributing religious pamphlets can be increasingly seen in local trains, parks and other public spaces. They often propagate anti-minority rumours and sentiments. Within Hindu communities, the formation of cow protection groups has intensified in recent years and has also contributed to the spread of rumours and hate speech.

These groups encourage various hateful beliefs about Muslims: That they are “cow eaters”, a threat to Hindu women, and members of terror sleeper cells. They spread ludicrous fears that the Muslim population is growing and will outnumber Hindus in India. This atmosphere of sus-tained hatred against Muslims makes attacks on them seem spontaneous and the product of mob anger. But few question why the mob is angry in the first place. In addition, the gen-eral perception of the justice system as slow and ineffective is making popular the idea that the people should take justice into their own hands.

The media and some observers, including as cautious a political analyst as Pratap Bhanu Mehta, feel that the current spate of mob lynching is qualitatively different and is setting a new benchmark.

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if you dare to dream of change, the autocratic regimes will mow you down. But Qatar will not back down from this unprovoked attack.

Qatar is a sovereign state proud to be at the forefront of develop-ment in the Arab world. It embraces change, encourages debate and supports those who need help, whatever their ethnic or religious background. When the Arab Spring came, it did not do so for one religion or sect but for all citizens in the region.

Besides Qatar’s participation in the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, we are also an active member of the American-led multinational alliance against terrorism. United States Air Force strikes against the Islamic State in Syria, and against terrorist groups in Afghanistan, take off from Al Udeid Air Base. Qatar is a key logistics hub in the international fight against terror-ism, and we have given it major financial and political support. We take satisfaction in this record.

In contrast to many regimes in the region, Qatar has championed American values, including consti-tutional government, freedom of speech and human rights. The Trump administration should advise its Gulf allies to change course. If the United States contin-ues to stand by and acquiesce to the bloc’s hostile action against Qatar, which can drag our region only deeper into division and instability, American interests in the Middle East will be imperiled.

The writers is Qatar’s ambas-sador to Russia.

ApoorvanandAl Jazeera

Fahad bin Mohammed Al AttiyahThe New York Times

Qatar is being punished because conservative actors in the bloc, emboldened by changes in the geopolitical balance in the region, see an opportunity to show people in the Arab world that if you dare to dream of change, the autocratic regimes will mow you down. But Qatar will not back down from this unprovoked attack.

Minorities no longer expect the ruling BJP to condemn the mob lynchings. What is more worrying is that other political parties are also not too forthcoming. Other than in one or two tweets and customary condemnation, they have refrained from visiting the victims or their surviving families.

10 SATURDAY 8 JULY 2017AMERICAS

Washington

Reuters

Two US bombers have flown over the dis-puted South China Sea, the US Air Force said yesterday, asserting

the right to treat the region as international territory despite China’s claim to virtually all of the waterway.

The flight by the B-1B Lancer bombers from Guam on Thurs-day came as US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping prepare for a meeting on the sidelines of a G20 summit in Germany. The two leaders were expected to discuss what China can do to rein in North Korea’s missile and nuclear weapon programmes.

North Korea fired an inter-continental ballistic missile on Tuesday that some experts believe has the range to reach

Alaska and Hawaii and perhaps the US Pacific Northwest.

While Trump has been seek-ing China’s help to press North Korea, the US military has,

nevertheless, been asserting its “freedom of navigation” rights in the South China Sea, at the risk of angering China.

Asked about the flight by the two US bombers, Chinese For-eign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said there was no prob-lem with freedom of navigation or overflight for the East and South China Seas. “But China res-olutely opposes individual countries using the banner of freedom of navigation and over-flight to flaunt military force and harm China’s sovereignty and security,” he said. China’s Defence Ministry, in a short statement sent to Reuters, said China always maintained its vig-ilance and “effectively monitors relevant countries’ military activities next to China”.

“The Chinese military will resolutely safeguard national sovereignty and security as well as regional peace and stability,” it added, without elaborating.

The United States has criti-cised China’s build-up of military facilities on South China Sea reefs and tiny islands it has con-structed, concerned that they could be used to extend its stra-tegic reach. Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Taiwan

also have claims in the sea, through which about $5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes each year. The two Lancers that made the flight had earlier trained with Japanese jet fighters in the neigh-bouring East China Sea, the first time the two forces had

conducted joint night-time drills. Two US Lancers flew from Guam over the South China Sea last month, while a US warship car-ried out a manoeuvring drill within 12 nautical miles of one of China’s artificial islands in the waterway in late May.

US bombers fly over

disputed China territory

A B-1B Lancer soaring over the Pacific Ocean after air refueling training at Andersen Air Force Base in Guam, yesterday.

Talks soon

The flight by the B-1B Lancer bombers from Guam came as US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping prepare for a meeting on the sidelines of a G20 summit in Germany.

The two leaders were expected to discuss what China can do to rein in North Korea’s missile and nuclear weapon programmes.

Washington

Reuters

President Donald Trump’s commission to investigate possible election fraud will

convene this month, a govern-ment notice said yesterday, as more US states have refused to hand over at least some voter data.

Trump created the Presiden-tial Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in May, after claiming without evidence that millions of people voted illegally for his Democratic rival, Hillary

Clinton, in the 2016 election. US civil rights groups and Demo-cratic lawmakers have called the panel a voter suppression tactic by Trump, a Republican who won the presidential election by securing a majority in the Elec-toral College tally of delegates even as he lost the popular vote to Clinton by some 3 million votes.

The Electronic Privacy Infor-mation Center, a watchdog group, has filed a lawsuit to block the commission’s data request until its privacy impact can be weighed. A hearing in the case

was scheduled for yesterday afternoon.

There is a wide consensus among state officials from both parties and election experts that voter fraud is rare. States reject-ing the commission’s attempts to gather voter information have called it unnecessary and a vio-lation of privacy.

The commission will meet on July 19 to swear in members, for-mulate objectives and discuss next steps after asking the 50 states to turn over potentially sensitive voter information, according to a General Services

Administration (GSA) notice pub-lished in the Federal Register.

A June 28 letter from the election panel sought names, the last four digits of Social Security numbers, addresses, birth dates, political affiliations, felony con-victions and voting histories.

As of Wednesday, at least 44 states had refused to hand over at least some of the data requested, the Washington Post said. Republican Kansas Secre-tary of State Kris Kobach, the commission vice chairman, on Wednesday said such reports were false. He said in a statement

sent by the White House that 14 states and Washington, D.C., had rejected the request outright.

Matthew Dunlap, Maine’s Democratic secretary of state and a commission member, on Friday dismissed Trump’s claim that millions of voters illegally cast ballots. “We just don’t see that,” he told CNN. “People are incredibly law abiding.”

Although Maine is one state that has pushed back at the com-mission’s request, Dunlap said he hopes the panel can tackle voting issues including ballot access and hacking.

Trump's commission probing voter fraud to meet Ottawa

Reuters

Canada yesterday for-mally apologised to a Canadian citizen held

at Guantanamo Bay for a dec-ade and said it had reached a financial settlement with him, a decision that could prove unpopular for Prime Minis-ter Justin Trudeau.

Omar Khadr was cap-tured in Afghanistan in 2002 at age 15 after a firefight with US soldiers and spent a dec-ade in the prison on a US military base on the eastern tip of Cuba.

In 2010, the Canadian Supreme Court said Canada breached his rights by send-ing intelligence agents to the jail to interrogate him and sharing the results with the United States.

Guatemala City

Reuters

Guatemala’s Supreme Court ratified the extradition of Javier

Duarte, a former state gover-nor from Mexico’s ruling party wanted on charges of embezzlement and organized crime, and he could soon be turned over to Mexican authorities, a top official said.

Carlos Morales, Guatema-la’s foreign minister, told reporters that the Mexican embassy in the Central Amer-ican nation had been notified that the court’s ruling allowed for Duarte to be taken to Mex-ico as soon as Mexican authorities can put him on a plane. “As of this afternoon, we are able to hand over Duarte in an hour, in two hours, if Mexico wants it that way,” he said. An official at Mexico’s attorney general’s office said they did not expect to bring Duarte back to Mex-ico in the coming hours.

Duarte, who governed Veracruz for President Enrique Pena Nieto’s Institu-tional Revolutionary Party (PRI) until last year, denies any wrongdoing. He was arrested in Guatemala in April after more than five months on the run. He disappeared in last October.

Caracas

Reuters

Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro has said all state workers must

take part in a vote on July 30 for candidates to his controversial new superbody assembly, seek-ing to avoid an embarrassingly low turnout in a country seeth-ing with discontent.

Maduro has called for the Constituent Assembly, with powers to reform the constitu-tion and supersede other institutions, in what he says is an attempt to bring peace after three months of anti-govern-ment protests in which at least 90 people have died.

Opponents say the leftist president is trying to formalise

a dictatorship in the South American Opec nation through what they view as a sham poll. They plan a rival, unofficial ref-erendum on July 16 to give Venezuelans a say on his plan.

Maduro has been trying to drum up his base, which mostly encompasses state workers and poorer Venezuelans. “If there are 15,000 workers, all 15,000 workers must vote without any excuses,” he told red-shirted supporters in the jungle and savannah state of Bolivar.

“Company by company, ministry by ministry, governor-ship by governorship, city hall by city hall, we’re all going to vote for the Constituent Assem-bly. Do you understand? Do you agree,” he said to a chorus of “Yes!”. Venezuela’s roughly 2.8

million state employees, a size-able part of the population of around 30 million, are often obliged to attend government rallies, and some say they are already coming under pressure to vote on July 30.

“This is crazy. (They’re say-ing), workers who don’t go to vote will be sacked,” said one employee of state oil company PDVSA, asking to remain anon-ymous. “I’ll vote, but null. I’m not going to vote for any of these nuts running for the assembly,” he added. Many familiar faces of the ruling Socialist Party are vying for a seat, including former Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez and powerful party No. 2 Diosdado Cabello. Madu-ro’s wife and son are also running.

Maduro orders state workers to vote for controversial assembly

Canada formally apologises to detained man

Guatemala clears way to extradite former governor

Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro greets workers during a meeting at the Francisco de Miranda hydroelectric complex in Caruachi, Venezuela, yesterday.

Acapulco

AFP

As shell-shocked families waited to identify the decapitated and muti-

lated bodies of their loved ones after a grisly prison riot in Mex-ico, an ex-inmate called the jail a "time bomb" where gangs reigned.

Twenty-eight inmates were killed as rioters beheaded and hacked their rivals to death Thursday at the Las Cruces prison in Acapulco, the latest explosion of violence in Mexi-co's often lawless jails.

Overnight, dozens of griev-ing relatives gathered outside the Pacific coast resort town's morgue waiting to be called in to identify their loved ones' bodies. As they waited in agony, the red and blue of police sirens flashing across their faces, they spoke in hushed tones about what they described as the

abysmal conditions inside the jail, which holds nearly 2,200 inmates -- 65 percent over capacity, according to official figures. "He didn't have to tell me how badly they treated him inside. You could see it a mile away," one 25-year-old woman said of her dead relative, fear-ful of giving her name.

"The mafia ruled in there. The others lived in fear."

One man waiting outside, himself a former prisoner, told AFP the prison was effectively governed by gangs -- like many in Mexico, where corruption abounds in the penitentiary system and the multi-billion-dollar narcotics business has fueled an explosion of power-ful, ultra-violent drug cartels.

Forensic investigators found five bullet casings inside -- apparently fired by prison-ers. Mexico's prisons are frequently hit by riots, killings and jailbreaks.

Toll rises to 28 in Mexico jail brawl

Riot police stand guard outside Las Cruces prison in Acapulco, Guerrero state, yesterday.

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15SATURDAY 8 JULY 2017 BREAK TIME

Yesterday’s answer

SHOWING ATVILLAGGIO & CITY CENTER

BABY

BLU

ES

ALL IN THE MIND

AEROBICS, ATHLETICS, BALANCE BEAM, BARBELL, BICEPS, BIKE, BODY BUILDING, DELTOID, DIET, EXERCISE, FITNESS, GYMNASIUM, HEALTH, HORSE, JOGGING, MEDICINE BALL, MUSCLES, NUTRITION, PARALLEL BARS, PECTORAL, PHYSIQUE, PUSH UPS, RINGS, ROWING MACHINE, RUNNING, SPORT, SWIMMING, TRAINER, TRAMPOLINE, TREADMILL, TRICEPS, WEIGHTS, WORKOUT.

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Conceptis Sudoku: Conceptis Sudoku is a number-

placing puzzle based on a 9×9 grid. The object is to

place the numbers 1 to 9 in the empty squares so

that each row, each column and each 3×3 box

contains the same number only once.

CROSSWORD

CONCEPTIS SUDOKU

Yesterday's answer

MALL

LANDMARK

ROYAL PLAZA

ASIAN TOWN

NOVO — Pearl

ROXY

Tisbah Ala Khair (2D/Arabic) 10:00am, 12:00noon, 12:20, 2:00, 3:00, 4:00, 5:40, 6:00, 8:00, 8:20, 10:00, 11:00pm, 12:00midnight & 01:40am Spider Man: Homecoming (3D/Adventure) 12:00noon, 2:45, 5:30, 7:00, 8:15, 9:40 11:00pm & 12:20am The House (2D/Comedy) 11:30am, 1:30, 3:30, 5:30, 7:30, 9:30 & 11:30pm Despicable Me 3 (2D/Animation) 10:00, 11:00am, 12:00noon, 1:00, 2:00, 3:00, 4:00, 5:00 & 6:00pm Transformers: The Last Knight (2D/Action) 8:00 & 11:00pm Overdrive (2D/Action) 10:30am, 2:45, 7:00 & 11:15pm Antar Ibn Shaddad (2D/Arabic) 12:30, 4:45 & 9:00pmPirates of The Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge (2D/Action) 10:00am, 12:40, 3:20, 6:00, 8:40 & 11:20pm Inconceivable (2D/Thriller) 10:30am, 3:00, 7:30pm & 12:00midnight How To Be A Latin Lover (2D/Comedy) 12:40, 5:10 & 9:40pmSpider Man: Home Coming (3D IMAX/Action) 10:40am, 1:20, 4:00, 6:40, 9:20pm & 12:00midnight

Despicable Me 3 (2D/Animation) 1:30 & 4:30pmMom (2D/Comedy) 1:30pm & 12:00midnight Spiderman: Homecoming (2D/Adventure) 3:00, 7:30, 10:00pm & 12:15am Ninnu Kori (2D/Telugu) 2:00pm The House (2D/Comedy) 4:00 & 8:00pm How To Be A Latin Lover (2D/Comedy) 5:30pm Inconceivable (2D/Thriller) 5:30 & 10:00pm Tisbah Ala Khair (2D/Arabic) 6:00 & 9:30pm Guest In London (2D/Comedy) 7:30pm Role Models (2D/Malayalam) 11:30pm

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Spiderman: Homecoming (2D/Adventure) 2:00, 4:30, 9:00 & 11:30pm Despicable Me 3 (2D/Animation) 1:30, 4:00 & 5:30pmNinnu Kori (2D/Telugu)1:30pm Mom (2D/Comedy) 3:00 & 12:00midnight Inconceivable (2D/Thriller) 5:30pm & 12:00midnight The House (2D/Comedy) 7:00 & 8:30pm Tisbah Ala Khair (2D/Arabic) 7:00 & 10:00pm How To Be A Latin Lover (2D/Comedy) 7:30pm Role Models(2D/Malayalam) 9:30pm

Role Models (2D/Malayalam) 12:30, 1:30, 3:30, 4:30, 6:30, 7:30, 9:30,

& 10:30pm

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Spiderman: Homecoming (2D/Adventure) 12:00noon 2:45, 5:30, 8:15 & 11:00pm Mom (2D/Comedy) 12:00noon & 2:50pm How To Be A Latin Lover (2D/Comedy) 8:30 & 11:00pm Vekham Vedra (Tamil) 6:30, 9:30 & 12:30 Role Models 5:40, 8:30 & 11:20pm

Yesterday's answer

SATURDAY 8 JULY 2017

FAJRSHOROOK

03.21 am

04.50 am

ZUHRASR

11.39 am

03.02 pm

MAGHRIBISHA

06.30 pm

08.00 pm

PRAYER TIMINGS

HIGH TIDE 03:00 – 17:15 LOW TIDE 09:45 – 00:00

Hazy to misty at places at first be-

comes hot daytime with some

clouds and humid by night.

WEATHER TODAY

Minimum Maximum

Courtesy: Qatar Meteorology Department

31oC 41oC

20 MORNING BREAK

Paris

AFP

The orangutan population on the island of Borneo has shrunk by a quarter

in the last decade, research-ers said yesterday, urging a rethink of strategies to protect the critically-endangered great ape.

The first-ever analysis of long-term orangutan popula-tion trends revealed a worrying decline, they said.

An international team of researchers used a combina-tion of helicopter and ground surveys, interviews with local communities, and modelling techniques to draw a picture of change over the past ten years. Previous counts have largely relied on estimations based on ground and aerial surveys of orangutan nests.

Some suggested that Bornean orangutan numbers were in fact increasing.

The new findings, the team said in a statement, are "a wake-up call for the oran-g u t a n c o n s e r v a t i o n community and the Indone-sian and Malaysian governments who have com-mitted to saving the species." Every year, some $30-40m is spent in the region to halt wildlife decline.

"The study shows that these funds are not effectively spent," said the team.

The biggest threat to oran-gutans, one of only two great ape species found in Asia today, are habitat loss due to farming and climate change, and their killing for food or in conflict with humans.

Some 2,500 orangutans are killed in Borneo every

year, the researchers said.The findings were pub-

lished in the journal Scientific Reports. The study provides no raw population numbers, but an estimate of individuals per 100 square kilometres (39 square miles) of forest -- down from about 15 in the period 1997-2002 to about 10 in 2009-2015. "The species (is) estimated to have declined at an alarming rate of 25 percent over the past 10 years," the researchers concluded.

Right now, 10,000 oran-gutans live in areas earmarked for oil palm production, said study co-author Erik Meijaard of the University of Queens-land. "If these areas are converted to oil palm planta-tions without changes in current practices, most of these 10,000 individuals will be destroyed and the steep

population decline is likely to continue," he said. "The study's worrying outcomes

suggest that we need to fun-damentally rethink orangutan conservation strategies."

Borneo's orangutans in 'alarming' decline: Study

Vena, a seven-month-old baby orangutan, during a rescue operation by the International Animal Rescue and Indonesian Nature Resources Conservation Agency (BKSDA) at the Air Hitam Besar village.

Paris

AFP

Hopes of finding life on Mars, at least on the surface, were

dealt a blow by a study revealing that salt minerals present on the Red Planet kill bacteria.

In lab tests on Earth, the compounds known as per-chlorates killed cultures of the bacteria Bacillus subti-lis, a basic life form, a research duo from the Uni-versity of Edinburgh's School of Physics and Astronomy reported.

Perchlorates, stable at room temperature, become active at high heat. Mars is very cold. In the new study, Jennifer Wadsworth and

Charles Cockell showed the compound can also be activated by UV light, with-out heat, in conditions mimicking those on the martian surface. It killed bacteria within minutes, said the team, implying the planet was "more uninhab-itable than previously thought." "If we want to find life on Mars, we have to take this into consider-ation and look at trying to find sub-surface life that wouldn't be exposed to t h e s e c o n d i t i o n s , " Wadsworth said.

Perchlorates are natu-ral and man-made on Earth, but are more abundant on Mars where they were first recorded by Nasa's Phoenix Lander in 2008. The fact

that perchlorates killed B. subtilis in the presence of UV radiation did not neces-sarily mean that all other life forms would similarly die, said Wadsworth. Fur-ther tests would have to be done to confirm this. Per-chlorates have previously been spotted in lines, thought to be brine streaks, on the surface of Mars. Their presence was presented as evidence by scientists in 2015 of liquid water on the Red Planet.

But the new study said brine seeps, "although they represent local regions of water availability, could be deleterious to cells" if they contain perchlorates. The findings do contain some good news.

Study: Mars surface 'more uninhabitable' than thought

Sedimentary deposits are seen on Mars surface in this picture released by Nasa.

Sydney

AFP

Pop superstar Katy Perry has been slammed by animal activists for tell-

ing her pet dog to "chase some koalas" in a promotional video for the Australian leg of her global tour.

The plug for Perry's "Wit-ness" tour next year, which also pushes the country's top department store Myer and its 8,000 ticket giveaway for the shows, featured the singer telling the poodle: "Let's go chase some koalas, Nugget."

Koalas on Australia's east coast are listed as vulnerable to extinction, with dog attacks, habitat loss and vehicle strikes among the top causes of the population decline.

"This is just absolute

ignorance from Perry and Myer, and inappropriate on so many levels," wildlife vet Claire Madden told Queens-land's Courier Mail. "Perry is a role model to so many young people, and this just destroys all the good work we do to try to encourage people not to let their dogs come into contact with koalas." The retailer also came under fire on social media. "How could you even think this was OK? On any level? Pathetic. Cruelty to ani-mals is not a joke", one user wrote on Facebook.

Following the backlash a Myer spokeswoman told AFP the company had removed the reference to koalas in the video. It replaced the line with: "OK Nugget, it's time to get you a puppy passport".

Perry is not the first

celebrity to come under fire in Australia over her dog. In 2015 Hollywood star Johnny Depp and his then-wife Amber Heard also caused a storm when they failed to declare her two dogs on arrival into the country.

The "Pirates of the Carib-bean" actor drew the ire of Deputy Prime Minister Barn-aby Joyce, who ordered Depp's dogs Pistol and Boo to "bugger off" back to Holly-wood or face being put down in a case dubbed 'War on Ter-rier'. "Johnny Depp all over again," complained one Face-book user on Myer's page. "Arrogance and disrespect for Australia." Perry, the first user to garner 100 million follow-ers on Twitter, has not commented about the video on social media.

Katy Perry promo slammed for koala joke

US singer Katy Perry and her mother Mary pose during the photocall before Chanel 2017-2018 fall/winter Haute Couture collection show in Paris.

Washington

IANS

In a major leap ahead to life beyond chargers, cords and dying phones, researchers

have invented a cellphone that works without batteries.

Instead, the phone harvests the few microwatts of power it requires from either ambient radio signals or light.

The team also made Skype calls using its battery-free phone, demonstrating that the prototype made of commercial, off-the-shelf components can receive and transmit speech and communicate with a base station, according to a study published in the journal Pro-ceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Inter-active, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies.

"We've built what we believe is the first functioning cellphone that consumes almost zero power," said study co-author Shyam Gollakota, Associate Professor at the Uni-versity of Washington.

"To achieve the really, really low power consumption that you need to run a phone by harvesting energy from the environment, we had to

fundamentally rethink how these devices are designed," Gollakota added.

The researchers explained that the battery-free cellphone takes advantage of tiny vibra-tions in a phone's microphone or speaker that occur when a person is talking into a phone or listening to a call.

An antenna connected to those components converts that motion into changes in stand-ard analog radio signal emitted by a cellular base station.

This process essentially encodes speech patterns in reflected radio signals in a way that uses almost no power.

To transmit speech, the phone uses vibrations from the device's microphone to encode speech patterns in the reflected signals. To receive speech, it converts encoded radio signals into sound vibrations that that are picked up by the phone's speaker. The team designed a custom base station to transmit and receive the radio signals.

Using off-the-shelf compo-nents on a printed circuit board, the team demonstrated that the prototype can perform basic phone functions -- transmitting speech and data and receiving user input via buttons.

Researchers invent cellphone that works without batteries