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Sunday 13 January 2013

1 Rabial I 1434 - Volume 17

Number 5578 Price: QR2

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Kuwait beat Saudi

Protecting land

Kuwait’s Yousef Al Sulaiman (20) kicks the ball to score a goal past Saudi Arabia’s goalkeeper Waleed Abdullah during their Gulf Cup tournament soccer match in Isa Town, Bahrain, yesterday. Kuwait beat Saudi Arabia 1-0.

Palestinian activists fix flags on a tent in an ‘outpost’ named Bab Al Shams (Gate of the Sun) that they set up between Jerusalem and the Jewish settlement of Maale Adumim in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, in an area where Israel has vowed to build new settler homes, yesterday. Full report on page 10

Business | 17 Sport | 25

Investors get richer by over QR21bn on QE

Shane clinches stunning win in Oryx Cup final

Al Jazeera ‘losing’ Arab viewersArab Spring boomerangsDOHA: While Al Jazeera Media Network has embarked on an ambitious expansion plan in the US with its acquisition of Al Gore’s Current TV, its popu-lar flagship Arabic channel is losing ground nearer home.

Al Jazeera Arabic is fast los-ing viewers in the Arab world, especially in countries where the channel provided exten-sive coverage of the revolu-tions, says London-based ‘The Economist’.

Numerous pan-Arab rivals have sprouted in the Arab Spring countries as well as Iraq with a copycat mix of flashy graphics, daring reportage and sizzling debate.

And to top it all, global media firms such as Bloomberg, News Corporation and CNN have pushed into the Arab market, said ‘The Economist’ in a report.

The journal highlights that Al Jazeera that provided “breathless” coverage of the Arab Spring to bring a regime change in coun-tries such as Tunisia, Egypt and Libya is facing stiff competition from the local players.

“Ironically, the Arab revo-lutions that Al Jazeera glee-fully promoted have produced a challenge to its dominance. Audiences in countries such as Egypt, Iraq and Tunisia are now gripped by fast-moving

local events more ably covered by independent national chan-nels that have proliferated rap-idly in a freer political climate, along with internet-borne social media”, the report adds.

Lamenting the group’s alleg-edly biased and selective coverage of the revolutions and ignoring uprisings in some Arab coun-tries, the report said: “Moreover, Al Jazeera Arabic’s vaunted repu-tation for even-handedness has withered in recent years”.

“The repressed voices it once daringly aired, particularly of Islamists linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, speak now from positions of power.”

Al Jazeera’s breathless boost-ing of rebel fighters in Libya and Syria, and of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, has made many Arab viewers question its veracity.

So has its tendency to ignore human rights abuses by those same rebels, and its failure to treat uprisings in all Arab coun-tries equally.

The world-renowned jour-nal, in its report, also hinted that not only viewers but some of the senior Al Jazeera corre-spondents also endorsed that the Channel is biased towards Muslim Brotherhood.

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DOHA: A Qatar Airways flight to an Indian city was diverted back to Doha early yesterday after a passenger complained of chest pain, accord-ing to reports in local Malayalam dailies.

T h e p a s s e n ge r, Padhmarajan, 40, complained of chest pain as soon as the flight took off at around 2am yesterday for Calicut in the south Indian state of Kerala.

Padhmarajan was rushed to the emergency unit of Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC) where he was declared dead.

The deceased had been living in Doha with family. It is not known if someone from his family was accom-panying him in the flight.

His body was to be flown home to Calicut early today. Qatar Airways couldn’t be immediately contacted for comment.

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Qatar renews call for Arab force in SyriaCAIRO: Qatar has made a fresh call for an Arab force to end bloodshed in Syria if cur-rent diplomatic efforts by inter-national peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi fail, according to Al Jazeera television.

Brahimi is trying to build on an agreement reached in Geneva on June 30 calling for a transi-tional period in Syria. But dif-ferences between Russia and the United States over the future of President Bashar Al Assad continue to block a deal to end 21 months of violence that has

killed more than 60,000 Syrians.“Arabs must think seriously

about sending forces to ensure security in Syria if diplomatic efforts fail to resolve the cri-sis,” Qatar’s Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, H E Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem bin Jabor Al Thani, said in remarks broadcast by Al Jazeera.

“From the beginning we all agree that a military solution is undesirable. Neither the Arab League nor the Arab Ministerial Committee on Syria, which I chair, favours this option, and

all the parties agree with us. But this does not mean that there are other tools to be used to stop the fighting in Syria,” the Prime Minister said.

“It is not a question of inter-vention in Syria in favour of one party against the other, but rather a force to preserve secu-rity,” the Prime Minister, who heads an Arab League com-mittee on Syria, said. “In my opinion, Arabs must seriously consider this (solution) if other means fail. Arabs are capable of ending the bloodshed,” he said.

Qatar, a supporter of rebels seeking to overthrow Assad, made a similar proposal in September. In a speech to the UN General Assembly, the Emir H H Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani said Arab states should intervene in Syria given the UN Security Council’s failure to stop the civil war.

Russia yesterday voiced sup-port for Brahimi’s efforts but insisted Assad’s exit cannot be a precondition for a deal to end the country’s conflict.

Continued on page 6

Many old buildings may face demolitionDOHA: The municipal minis-try is to decide soon the fate of a large number of old and dilapidated buildings in some key areas of Doha and Al Rayyan, and it is likely that many of them will come under bulldozers.

The Ministry of Municipality and Urban Planning has a list of these buildings and an internal committee is studying which ones to spare for renovation and which ones are to be razed to the ground.

The Ministry says it is empow-ered by the law to demolish a building without seeking the consent of its owner if it is found endangering people’s lives.

What apparently worries the ministry is the fact that many of these buildings are occupied, mainly by expatriates, despite being uninhabitable due to their dilapidated condition.

Only one of these ram-shackle structures, a building located behind Bank Street, has been referred to the Museums Authority and there is a possibility it will be declared a heritage site.

If the Museums Authority decides to adopt the building as a historical site, it could carry out the necessary repairs and declare it a part of Qatari heritage.

The areas in which the old and dilapidated buildings are located include Najma, Umm Ghuwailina,

Old Airport, Bin Mahmoud, Old Salata, Old Ghanem, Doha Jadeed, Al Asmakh, Freej Abdul Aziz, Bin Omran and New and Old Al Rayyan.

Interestingly, the owners of the buildings that are eventu-ally earmarked for being razed would be required to pay a fee and share 25 percent of the cost of the demolition with the ministry.

The real estate registra-tion of buildings whose owners refuse to pay the fee and share the cost of demolition would be scrapped. In other words, the owners would not be able to sell the property. Only one of the above-mentioned ramshackle buildings belongs to the govern-ment, it is understood.

The ministry is also mulling amending the law to make it mandatory for building owners to keep the passage between one building and another clean at all times.

The amendment would also make it illegal for building own-ers to use rooftops as storage areas and garbage dumps. They would be required to keep the rooftops clean and tidy at all times.

There is a likelihood that civic inspectors will be armed with judicial powers to carry out regular inspections of rooftops of buildings.

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Empty West Bay towers await single tenantsBY SATISH KANADY

DOHA: A number of towers in the West Bay area, called Doha’s Manhattan, are lying vacant as their owners insist on leasing them out to single ten-ants in order to ensure hassle-free and long-term income.

This points to a new trend emerging in Qatar’s booming property market as real estate investors seem to be keen on rent-ing out multistorey commercial buildings, especially towers, to

single tenants rather than sev-eral of them.

Owner-investors believe leas-ing out commercial space to a sin-gle tenant guarantees long-term income, in addition to helping cut down management costs.

According to leading prop-erty consultants, there are quite a number of towers in the West Bay waiting for single tenants. Renting out a 30-40 storey build-ing to several tenants means the owner has to spend a lot of money to manage the building.

When a tower is rented out to multiple entities the chances of several floors lying vacant for long are high, owners fear.

They believe it is difficult to find a tenant for a vacant floor if the other floors are occupied. “There is a risk of losing the annual income 40 to 50 percent in the event of renting out a tower to multiple tenants,” said Jed Wolfe, Managing Director of Asteco Qatar.

“A single tenant means that you will get a guaranteed income for long. And you need not bother

about looking for new tenants in the event the existing ones go. Blue chip companies seldom like to move into a tower where other floors are occupied by other com-panies”, he said.

According to investors, single tenants are more flexible and will-ing to go for long-term relation-ships with property owners. The mutual trust and the guarantee of long-term income tend to boost the business confidence of both, the tenants and the property owners.

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Fire kills 13 in Bahrain workers’ housing blockMANAMA: A fire in a three-storey block housing Asian workers in the Bahraini capital killed at least 13 people, the state BNA news agency reported late on Friday. One firefighter was also injured when the building’s roof collapsed during a rescue attempt, the news agency added.

An investigation was under way to determine the cause of the fire, which broke out on Friday in the building in the Makharka district of central Manama. Foreigners make up 54 percent of the 1.234-million population of Bahrain.

AFP

Qatar Airways flight diverted

02 HOMESUNDAY 13 JANUARY 2013

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155 workers complete Rota’s English course52 volunteers from universities, QP participateDOHA: A total of 155 clean-ers, pantry staff and other sup-port staff, recently completed an English language course under Reach Out To Asia’s Adult English Literacy (RAEL) initiative sponsored by Qatar Petroleum.

Fifty-two volunteers from Georgetown School of Foreign Service-Qatar, Texas A&M University at Qatar, Weill Cornell Medical College Qatar, Rota and Qatar Petroleum participated in the RAEL fall semester programme.

“Sponsoring Reach Out To Asia’s Adult English Literacy programme clearly demonstrates the strength of QP’s partnership approach in our corporate social respon-sibility (CSR) initiatives,” said Abdulrahman Abdulla M Al Obaidly, Manager for Public Relations and Communications of QP.

“In addition, it affirms QP’s commitment to the social devel-opment of Qatar as we contribute in empowering people with valu-able skills that will surely make a difference in their lives”.

Inaugurated in 2009, the RAEL programme was created by Roata to teach English literacy and language skills to low-skilled migrant workers, in partnership with Al Jaidah Group and several Education City universities such as Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, Carnegie Mellon University, Texas A & M University at Qatar and Weill Cornell Medical College Qatar.

“Receiving the support of Qatar’s most prominent corpora-tion is testament to the success of Rota’s Adult English Literacy initiative,” said Roata National Programme Director, Mohammed

Abdulla Al Saleh. “We are extremely grateful to QP for its assistance as the RAEL pro-gramme looks to continue teach-ing language skills that make a real difference to people’s lives”.

The RAEL programme provides both an educational opportunity for workers who may have had limited schooling in their own countries, and a valuable service learning opportunity for that gives students and volunteers new skills and an understanding of different communities and their needs.

Volunteers attend a two-day training programme to qualify as Literacy Trainers. The train-ing covers practical information relating to teaching English, communication across language barriers, and the effects of glo-bal migration. At the end of the training the trainers are given a

A Rota Adult English Literacy class in progress.

personal copy of the RAEL cur-riculum, in addition to lesson plans and activity sheets.

The trainers are responsible for teaching workers based in their university or organisation. The

literacy classes have traditionally been delivered over a period of 16 weeks with a mid-course break after the first 8 weeks, which is planned to coincide with the December break.

The 2012-13 fall semester began in October and ended in December, while the Spring semester starts in February and finishes in April 2013.

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Texas A&M hosts chemistry meet with Qafco support DOHA: Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ) recently hosted the Qafco-Texas A&M at Qatar Chemistry Conference 2013 on Thursday at the University’s Engineering Building in Education City.

The conference explored green chemistry and its appli-cation to environmental challenges as its main focus. This was the sixth event of this annual programme with Qafco that began in 2007.

The conference featured technical programmes and sessions showcased opinions and research from some of the most respected names in green chemistry and engineering.

TAMUQ Dean and CEO Dr Mark H Weichold noted the importance of collaborations between industry and academia such as the chemistry conference saying:“Thank you to Qafco for unwavering support of Texas A&M at Qatar. This generous support is a wise investment, as the opportunities it creates through the free flow of ideas between scholars and industry practitioners work to solve complex global challenges.”

Dr Paul T Anastas, professor of chemistry and director of the Centreor Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale University, gave the eynote address,“Green Chemistry: Current Status and Future Challenges.”

Anastas is credited with establishing the field of green chemistry during his time working for the US Environmental Protection Agency as the Chief of the Industrial Chemistry Branch and as the Director of the US Green Chemistry Programme

Qafco Vice-Chairman and CEO Khalifa Al Sowaidi emphasisd the importance of academic and indus-trial cooperation, and said: “I am proud that Qafco has been associated with this noble venture for so long and will continue to support similar ventures in future, as we are aware of our higher role on the global platform.”

Dr Hassan Bazzi, chair of TAMUQ Science Programme and associate professor of chemistry, said: “This confer-ence comes as the University celebrates its tenth anni-versary, a great milestone for us. A few weeks ago, the UN climate conference concluded its historical summit in Doha, and this goes very well with the theme that we chose for the conference, Green Chemistry & Green Engineering.”

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Cuban community hails new migration policyDOHA: The growing Cuban community in Qatar is eagerly looking forward to the new migration policy of the Caribbean country which will come into force tomorrow, said the Cuban Ambassador, Ernesto Plasencia.

Among other things, the changes in this policy will allow Cubans to leave the island without an exit permit or invitation from a citizen of the country of destination.

Plasencia told The Peninsula, “there has been a mat-uration process in the country’s relationship with its migrants. Now a Cuban emigrant can send their child to study at the University in Cuba,” he added.

From Monday, in order to travel Cubans will only need to submit the passport and the visa issued by the country of destination when it’s required.

“We have normalised our relationship with our emi-grants. There are 1,5 million Cubans living in over 150 countries, and 99.9 percent left for economic reasons, just like it happens in many other countries,” said Plasencia.

The ambassador said that Cuba was the first Latin American country to establish an embassy in Qatar nearly 20 years ago. He added that bilateral relations are of mutual respect and collaboration, with the embassy focus-ing on consolidating projects such as the Cuban Hospital.

Thanks to this hospital, which was officially inaugu-rated in January 2012, the Cuban population in Qatar will be around 400 at the end of the month, with the medical staff at the hospital reaching 386. However, only 25 people are registered residents here, said the ambassador.

THE PENINSULA

03SUNDAY 13 JANUARY 2013

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Guiragossian works go on show at The PearlThe Family exhibition features 17 paintings

FROM LEFT: Jean Paul Guiragossian, Manuella Guiragossian and Emmanuel Guiragossian addressing the media at the Anima Gallery at the Pearl Qatar here yesterday. (SALIM MATRAMKOT)

BY ISABEL OVALLE

DOHA: The first exhibition displaying works of renowned Armenian-Lebanese painter Paul Guiragossian, his sons Emmanuel and Jean Paul and his daughter Manuella, opened its doors yesterday at Anima Gallery at The Pearl Qatar.

Until February 28, the ‘The Family’ exhibition will feature 17 paintings — all of which have the human element in common —with a price range from QR3,650 to QR328,500.

The show comprises four pieces by Paul Guiragossian, which he painted between 1980 and 1987, another six pieces by Manuella, painted in 2010 and 2012, four by Emmanuel painted in 2007, 2008 and 2009, and three by Jean Paul painted in 2001 and 2008.

Paul Guiragossian (1926-1993) was born in a family of artists. He was the first artist to do a solo

show in Beirut and also exhibited collectively in Europe, the United States, Armenia, Belorussia, and Arab countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Syria.

Among his five children, three pursued a career in art. Emmanuel, the eldest, is a painter, sculptor, graphic artist, publisher and musician. He belongs to a sixth generation of artists and grew up influenced by his grandmother’s stories about the war.

The other son, Jean Paul, has also worked very lively through-out the years, participating in numerous collective exhibitions in Berlin, Tokyo, Paris, Madrid, New York, London and Los Angeles.

Manuella, the youngest of the siblings taking part in the exhibi-tion, has concentrated mainly in animations and had her first solo exhibition in 1989. In 2011, she established the Paul Guiragossian Foundation.

At a press briefing to launch the

exhibition, Manuella Guiragossian said that the artist can contribute to help people in suffering with a positive approach to the prob-lems that impact human life. “It’s important for me to take positiv-ity, inspire others and bring hope,” she added.

The family has one big studio in Lebanon where they discuss how to improve their work. Both Paul and Emmanuel paintings are mainly about the human condition, while Jean Paul paints about injus-tice towards women and nature.

It’s the first joint exhibition for the Guiragossian’s and also the first one for all of them in Doha. Jean Paul said that at first it was difficult for them to say yes to the proposal of curator Ghada Sholy of Anima Gallery. However, “she chose the paintings perfectly, selecting those that were con-nected without competing with each other,” he added.

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Demand-supply gap in property market narrowsDemand for residential buildings rises, says expertBY SATISH KANADY

DOHA: Qatar’s property mar-ket is fast narrowing in its demand-supply gap. The ‘over-hanging’ of Qatar’s real estate market is an old story; and looking from a medium term to long-term perspective, the demand side is set to erode the country’s previously oversupply record, a top property consult-ant has said.

Hit by huge demand-supply gap, Qatar’s property market has been considerably overhang-ing since 2009. But 2012 saw a 20 percent increase in terms of transaction volume and a high 35 percent in value terms, Jed Wolfe (pictured), Managing Director, Asteco Qatar told The Peninsula.

The demand side of residen-tial market is fast picking up in Qatar. In projects like The Pearl Qatar, there are very few vacant units available. The one-bed room apartment segment is fully booked.

Residential market is fast pick-ing up in Qatar. A breakdown in terms of leasing configura-tions of 2012 residential renting shows a 30 percent growth in one-bedroom apartment and 40 percent increase in two-bedroom apartments. The three-bedroom apartment segment has recorded

a 15 percent increase over the last one year, said Jed.

One-bedroom apartments in prime locations proved most pop-ular within the residential leasing market, while prime luxury villas of high quality performed the best during 2012. Demand for good quality, prime villas have margin-ally outstripped supply and this trend is likely to continue.

The performance of the prop-erty market is set to boost in 2013 with the major contracts for key projects for rail net work and associated construction projects are awarded.

The demand is fast outstrip-ping the supply in the commercial sector too, especially in the prime Diplomatic/West Bay areas. The rate of vacant space in prime locations has reduced consider-ably. The demand-supply gap will further narrow down by the end of 2013, he said.

In the commercial leasing mar-ket, the vast proportion of tenant inquiries were from international

companies seeking 200 to 600sqm of space. The 2012 Q4 witnessed the final let-tings in Tornado Tower and Al Fardan Commercial Tower, two of the most prestigious office towers in West Bay.

With the government issuing orders that future constructions in the Diplomatic areas should not have more than 20 floors, the demand has almost outstripped the sup-ply in this area. Plots are no more being developed in this area.

The fact that the Doha outskirts are emerging as prime locations is another indications of a matur-ing Qatari property mar-ket. The West Bay Area and Doha Downtown are considered a s prime loca-tions and the rents are very high. Not all business can afford these. So land developers are offering new locations.

According to Jed, the growing land value is unlikely to have its bearing on the rentals. “The the Gulf market is different. In terms of commercial space, tenants have a major stake in fixing rents. The residen-tial rentals are often influ-enced by the income levels of expatriates”.

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Asean community members engaged in a tug-of-war competition during the Family Day at the Barzan Olympic Park in Umm Salal Ali yesterday. (KAMMUTTY VP)

Asean Committee holds Family Day; Thailand is new chairmanBY RAYNALD C RIVERA

DOHA: A cultural festival is among the events likely to be organised by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) Committee in Doha this year under the chairman-ship of Thailand.

“One of our aims is to make our presence felt in the Qatari com-munity and promote camarade-rie among the Asean community members and a festival could be organised to showcase food and way of life of member countries,” Panyarak Poolthup, Ambassador of Thailand, told The Peninsula yesterday.

Yesterday, Thailand took over the reins as the new chairman of the Asean Committee in Doha (ACD) for the next six months after the Philippines.

Ambassador Poolthup said the heads of missions of seven Asean countries represented in Doha will hold a meeting at the end of this month to chart out plans for activities in the next six months and an Asean

festival could be on the list.Asked on the existing relations

among Asean missions here, he said: “We have very good relations but we want to have more peo-ple-to-people contact and events such as festivals are an excellent platform.”

Philippine Ambassador Crescente R Relacion, who chaired the committee for the last six months, was of the same view saying: “We have very close rela-tions. The Asean heads of mission meet at least every month and we also have a working committee headed by deputy heads of mis-sion, who are planning out for the different activities.”

The turn-over ceremony yes-terday was held as an important part of the Asean Family Day jointly organised by embassies of Brunei and Vietnam, featuring fun games and authentic delica-cies from each country. It was held at Barzan Olympic Park in Umm Salal Ali.

“The three pillars of the Asean community include the group as an economic, political

and socio-cultural commu-nity and this event targets the socio-cultural aspect”, said Ambassador Relacion, adding the Family Day was a big oppor-tunity for the different staff of the embassies to get acquainted with each other.

Ambassador Relacion consid-ered the first Asean Gala Dinner held last year under the chair-manship of Malaysia as a major achievement of the ACD since it was formally established one year ago.

Among the achievements of the ACD under the chairmanship of the Philippine mission included a cultural extravaganza celebrat-ing the founding anniversary of Asean in August last year and a painting contest in October the same year.

Established on August 8, 1967, Asean currently has 10 mem-ber countries, seven of which have embassies in Qatar. They are Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

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DOHA: The International Bank of Qatar (ibq) announced the launch of its new year-long credit cards promotion offering all ibq credit cardholders superb savings at a range of premium merchant partners spanning hotels, dining outlets and more, a press release said yesterday.

The promotion runs from December 1, 2012 to December 31, 2013 with premium hotels, restaurants, cafes, beauty, fashion and health centres partnering with ibq to provide its credit cardholders with added-value benefits year-round. In addition to the merchant programme, credit card customers benefit from

free purchase protection and free travel insurance as part of the overall ibq credit card value proposition

The bank’s new merchant partner base includes: La Cigale Hotel, The Ritz-Carlton Doha, Four Seasons Doha Hotel, The St Regis Doha, Whyndham Grand Regency Doha, Sharq Village & Spa, The Torch, Millennium Hotel Doha, Grand Heritage Doha Hotel and Spa, Oryx Rotana Doha, Movenpick Tower & Suites Doha, 51 East, iSpace, Clarks, Mephisto, Point Zero, Bose, Bang & Olufsen, Tasmeem Flowers & Chocolates, 4 U, Dados Beauty, Qatar Optics, L’Ottico, Optic Gallery, Optifashion, Lunette, Grand Optical, Impression Boutique, Dados Boutique, Consult Dental Center, Gulf Adventures Tourism, Le Notre Paris, Roger’s Diner, Dunia Restaurant, Chili’s, Romano’s Macaroni Grill, Johnny Rockets, MBCO and Bert’s Cafe.

Luis Tomassoni, Head of Products and Marketing at ibq said: “This exclusive promotion for our credit cardhold-ers is supported by our wide range of premium merchant partners, offering our customers tangible value, benefits and banking experience. We understand our customers demanding lifestyle needs and as such our range of credit cards brings to the market the most comprehensive fea-tures, best-in-class services and exciting promotions. This underscores our commitment to position ibq as the Bank of Choice in Qatar.”

The credit cards of the bank are supported by a full retail banking platform including a 24/7 call centre, online banking with ibqonline and SMS banking, making banking convenient and easy for everyone.

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ibq launches credit card promotion

World Customs Organisation Secretary-General arrivesDOHA: World Customs Organisation (WCO) Secretary-General Kunio Mikuriya arrived in Doha yesterday on a two-day visit. While in Doha he will be briefed on Qatar’s Customs Department’s regional and international projects, programmes and strategic plans.

The official’s visit aims to activate means of cooperation between Qatar’s Customs Department and WCO, consid-ered the umbrella that covers regional and international customs work.

QNA

HOME 05SUNDAY 13 JANUARY 2013


QU signs MoU for CO2 projectOryx GTL to fund and provide expertise to Gas Processing CentreDOHA: Qatar University (QU) recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Oryx GTL for a research project with the university’s Gas Processing Centre (GPC) in the area of CO2 management.

The agreement’s main objec-tive is to provide assistance to the GPC in developing its research portfolio and in gradu-ating qualified Qatari nationals to contribute their knowledge and skills to this sector.

Under the agreement, Oryx GTL will fund and pro-vide expertise to support the Centre’s CO2 capture research project entitled “Process Development for CO2 Capture: Bench Scale Tests of Selected Chemical Solvents” which will evaluate the performance of different chemical solvents in capturing CO2 from the flue gas of a simulated natural gas-fired power plant.

Qatar University, through the GPC, will provide labo-ratory space, equipment and manpower for the project dura-tion. There will be exchange of information and joint monitor-ing of the programme between the two parties as well as joint activities such as workshops and conferences, supporting stu-dents’ projects, summer train-ing supervision, among others.

College of Engineering (CENG) Acting Dean Dr Rashid Al Ammari said: “Today we have another example of the shared vision of collaboration between academia and industry towards a common vision. We look forward to continuing our long relation-ship with Oryx GTL especially on this research project which studies an area of great impor-tance not only to the GPC but to Qatar and the rest of the world in dealing with CO2 mitigation”.

“A key objective of this agreement is to assist the Gas

Processing Center in develop-ing its research portfolio, which we believe is vital for the future of Qatar’s gas industry and its role in the National Vision 2030. Oryx GTL is committed to supporting academic work in Qatar to help overcome these challenges to the sustainable development of our natural resources, and we look for-ward to the findings of this research project,” said Oryx GTL Chief Operating Officer Etienne Rademeyer.

“It is an invaluable oppor-tunity for us to collaborate with Oryx GTL on this research that will be of great benefit to Qatar and will provide our students with knowledge and skills to meet

Qatar’s needs for professionals in this field,” said GPC Director Prof Abdelwahab Aroussi.

Oryx GTL Technical Manager Marcel Krause noted that “Oryx GTL was brought into existence to pioneer novel technology — it is in our blood. We were the first world scale GTL plant and

we led Qatar into the future as the world’s GTL capital. With QU and GPC, we are proud to once again go back to our roots and take a pioneering role, this time in the development of cut-ting-edge fundamental scientific knowledge”.

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Officials of Qatar University and Oryx GTL sign the memorandum of understanding.



QR20bn shopping malls to come upMost of new facilities to be built in Gharafa, Wakra, Kharatiat and Al Khor

An artist’s impression of the Doha Festival City.

DOHA: Qatar will soon have more cozy shopping malls and commercial complexes with at least nine such facilities costing a whopping QR20bn planned in the next three years.

Most of the new facilities will be built in Gharafa, Kharatiyat, Wakra and Al Khor and some will be based in the new township to be developed on the location of the existing Doha International Airport, according to Al Sharq.

The UAE-based Al Futaim Group has already announced plans to open its first shopping mall in Qatar, Doha Festival City, which is expected to cost QR6bn. Industry sources expect the facil-ity to be ready in two to three years.

Ezdan will build three malls in Gharafa, Wakra and Wukair under its new arm Ezdan Mall Company to be launched very soon, said the daily.

The North Gate Mall, a luxury shopping facility in Khartiyat is expected to be completed by next year, while work on the Marina Mall would start this year. The Doha Mall in Mesaimeer costing QR2.5bn and the Tawar Mall are among the other projects in the pipeline.

Industry experts believe that there is still space for big shop-ping malls in Qatar, with a booming market and growing population.

“Qatar still do not have many big shopping malls. Over the past three years, only one such facility was opened in Al Khor,” said a senior official of a leading hyper-market chain.

“The market will become more vibrant with opening of more commercial facilities,” he added.

The success of a new facility

Emir receives telephone call from ErdoganDOHA: The Emir H H Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani received yesterday a tele-phone call from Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister of the Republic of Turkey. They dis-cussed bilateral ties and the lat-est developments in the region.

Qatar sends aid shipment for Syrian refugeesDOHA: Under the sublime directives of the Heir Apparent H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, an urgent shipment of Qatari aid was sent to Syrian refugees in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan.

A source from the Qatar’s Foreign Ministry told Qatar News Agency that the 38 tonnes of aid included tents, blankets and clothes to help the refugees face the bad weather conditions.

The source stressed that the aid was sent out of Qatar’s sense of duty towards the Syrian people in their plight. He added that the brotherly and historic relations between the people of both countries was also a catalyst that prompted Qatar to send the aid shipment. It is also as part of Qatar’s continuous efforts to alleviate the suffering of the Syrian people, he said.

Board members for Wakrah Youth Centre namedDOHA: The Minister of Culture, Arts and Heritage, H E Dr Hamad bin Abdul Aziz Al Kuwari, issued a decision appointing a board of directors for the Wakra Youth Centre.

The Minister chose Dr Khalid bin Nasser Al Khater as president and Hassan Abbas Hassan Abdul Rahim, Youssef Abdullah Abdul Rahman Al Abdullah, Reem Said Mubarak Al Khater and Hassan Abdullah Mohammed Saleh as members of the board.

The decision said that the board shall elect one of the mem-bers to be a vice-president, secre-tary-general and assistant to the secretary-general. The board’s duration is four years according to the decision. The centre’s head-quarters will be located in Wakra.

Private firms asked to create jobs for nationalsDOHA: The Ministry of Labour has asked private companies to review their work mechanisms and create job opportunities for locals in a bid to steamroll the state’s job nationalisation drive in the private sector.

The ministry has said the per-centage of citizens in private jobs is quite low at barely five percent and it needs to be increased to 15 percent by the end of the current plan period (2011-16).

The ministry, which is tasked with achieving the above target, is expected to review its own recruitment policy to help nation-als get into the private sector in increasing numbers.

Private players have been asked to assess their job requirements for the next five years and pro-vide feedback to the ministry about manpower requirements in terms of qualifications, speciali-sations and experience for those who would be filling those jobs.

As preparations for the FIFA 2022 event get under way, the ministry has asked the private sector to provide details of added jobs they would be creating, Al Sharq reported yesterday.

‘Jazeera English not immune’

Continued from page 1

“It is not just viewers who notice. When Sultan Qassemi, a pundit in the United Arab Emirates, wrote an article last year noting the channel’s pro-Brotherhood bias, he said dozens of Al Jazeera staff sent confirming e-mails.” “Not a few such people, including star correspondents in Beirut, Berlin, Cairo, Moscow and Paris, have quit in recent years. Even Al Jazeera English, with a solid reputation built since its birth in 2006, is not immune.”

THE PENINSULA/QNA

Renowned diabetes specialist joins HMCDOHA: The Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC) has brought in a renowned diabetes specialist and endocrinologist to support its efforts to tackle the rising incidence of diabetes and metabolic diseases in the country.

The International Diabetes Federation has indicated that the prevalence of diabetes in Qatar is about 20 percent, HMC said yesterday, while announcing the appointment of Professor Abdul Badi Abou Samra (pictured), as Chair of the Department of Medicine.

Abou Samra is a specialist in the fields of biochemistry, endo-crinology, internal medicine and molecular biology.

HMC is currently in the

process of establishing a dedi-cated, one-stop, multidiscipli-nary diabetes centre within Hamad General Hospital, bring-ing together a range of services under one roof.

The clinic will be staffed by physicians, dieticians, patient educators and podiatrists and will offer a variety of services includ-ing an eye clinic and insulin pump clinic. Due to be operational by mid- 2013, the centre will play an important role in the treatment and management of diabetes in Qatar.

“Professor Abou-Samra will be a key figure in the future design and operation of our National Diabetes Centre and he will help us to lead research in this field to tackle diabetes. His experience

and expertise in diabetes will be invaluable in supporting and developing our current initia-tives in this area,” said HMC Managing Director Dr Hanan Al Kuwari

Abou-Samra has held previous roles as Professor of Medicine and Chief of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolic Diseases at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, Michigan.

His career includes senior aca-demic and hospital appointments at the Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital and Lyon University in France, among others.

“I look forward to working with the committed team at HMC on improved treatments for people living with diabetes in Qatar as

well as finding innovative and long lasting ways to prevent its spread,” Professor Abou-Samra said of his new role.

THE PENINSULA

depends on many factors, mainly the location, the way it is managed and the nature of its business.

“Professionalism in manage-ment is a very important factor.

There are many shopping facili-ties in key locations that are struggling to win customers,” he said.

The increase in the number

of facilities may not necessar-ily bring the prices down since the market in Qatar is already competitive.

“Commodity prices in Qatar

are mainly dependent on the prices in international market. Local factors have only limited impact on the prices,” he said.

THE PENINSULA

Fisherman given one year in jail for crossing borderDOHA: A criminal court has sentenced a fisherman to a year in jail after he ventured into the Qatari territorial waters with his vessel illegally and tried to prevent arrest by hitting the boat of the Qatari coast guard.

The court, however, kept its sentence in suspension for three years and ordered that the fisher-man be deported.

A witness from Qatar’s coast guards told the judges that when they sighted the fishing vessel they fired two warning shots for it to stop, but instead of stopping the man in the vessel tried to hit the boat of the security guards with his vessel.

“We, however, managed to stop his vessel and arrest him,” said the witness.

THE PENINSULA

Premier blasts Assad’s remarks

Continued from page 1 Brahimi indicated the issue of

Assad, whom the US, European powers and Gulf-led Arab states insist must step down to end the war, was a sticking point at a meeting on Friday with envoys from Russia and the United States .

“We support this effort,” said Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem, refer-ing to Brahimi’s peace initiative. “But until when? We cannot wait forever on this issue.”

Diplomacy, he said, “may con-tinue for two or three or four weeks, but no more because there is a tragic situation in Syria. We cannot justify that we are now talking of solutions.”

Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem blasted Assad’s statement that the fighting was not over power. “If the conflict is not over power, why does he not hand over power to the Syrian people,” the Premier asked.

The Premier stressed that any solution that includes the Assad regime will not end the blood-bath. “We support the opposition and the Syrian people in their quest for liberation from this regime,” he said, pointing to the death and destruction that have ravaged the country for nearly two years.

REUTERS & QNA

National Library to move to new building soonDOHA: The Qatar National Library (QNL) (Dar Al Kutb), the oldest pub-lic library in Qatar will be moving to a 14-storey build-ing near the Qatar National Museum very soon, a senior official has said.

“The building is ready and only the furnishing work remains. Some administrative procedures are also to be com-pleted. We will be moving as soon these are over,” QNL direc-tor Abdullah Nasser Al Ansari told Al Sharq.

The new premises will include a special section for children’s books, and an activity room for the public, among other facilities.

There is also a plan to add more titles and include more services at the library, said the official.

Functioning in a small, old building near the Souq area for many years, the QNL has been facing severe space constraints and was on the look out for new premises.

There had been reports earlier that the facility would be shifted to another build-ing near the Hamad General Hospital.

THE PENINSULA

Hakkasan restaurant to open at St Regis Doha on January 16DOHA: Hakkasan, the Michelin-starred, modern Cantonese fine dining restau-rant, is to open doors in Doha on January 16 at The St Regis Doha.

Following the successful launch of Hakkasan in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, Doha will be the third res-taurant in the GCC region and the latest addition to Doha’s bur-geoning restaurant scene.

Beautifully designed by Woods Bagot UK, Hakkasan Doha fea-tures a private valet service access set within the gardens of the St Regis Hotel Doha. The new 120 cover restaurant features a dramatic entrance through its iconic long corridor in slate stone and offers an additional capacity of 60 seats on its outside terrace.

The stunning terrace features cascading wooden pavilions sur-rounded by exquisite greenery, creating a relaxed garden atmos-phere and serving as the perfect venue for both private gatherings and large parties. The restaurant will also feature a Ling-Ling Lounge, ideal for small intimate gatherings.

Niall Howard, CEO, Hakkasan said: “The opening of Hakkasan

Doha highlights our success in both Abu Dhabi and Dubai. It was only logical to bring Hakkasan to Doha and we look forward to a long and fruitful relationship with The St Regis Doha”.

Head Chef Lai Min Wei, formerly of Hakkasan Dubai has overseen the creation and preparation of the Hakkasan menu which has been rig-orously tested and tweaked in order to ensure the highest of standards. Hakkasan Doha will continue the proud tradition of including signa-ture dishes found across its restau-rants including Peking Duck with Caviar, Jasmine Tea smoked Wagyu Beef Ribs and Grilled Chilean Seabass with Chinese Honey. In keeping with Hakkasan’s ritual, Doha will have a number of specially designed dishes, including Stir-fried Duck with Wing Bean or Shanghai Fried Lamb Tenderloin.

Tareq Derbas, General Manager of The St Regis Doha said: “The opening of such an iconic restaurant within our grounds is a testament to the vision and drive of our owners. Hakkasan Doha completes our extensive dining offering and will certainly contribute to posi-tioning the hotel as Doha’s best

culinary destination.”Since the opening of Hakkasan

Abu Dhabi and Dubai, Hakkasan has quickly earned its title as the Emirate’s foremost dining des-tination, attracting the likes of Uma Thurman, Morgan Freeman, and Clive Owen and achieving a staggering line up of accolades as a testament to its success. These include Caterer Middle East’s Top Outlet Opening of the Year 2010, Time Out Abu Dhabi’s Best Newcomer Restaurant Award 2010, three category wins at the UAE people’s choice What’s On Awards 2010 ceremony – the Favourite Far Eastern Restaurant, Favourite New Comer and for the Best Chef of the Year 2010, and Time Out Abu Dhabi’s Best Chinese Award 2011.

Since its 2001 opening in London, Hakkasan has developed a loyal following across its US, UK and Middle Eastern restaurants. A favorite amongst the internationally renowned trendsetters, Hakkasan restaurants have long been synony-mous with contemporary Chinese dishes in elegant surroundings whether it be in New York, Los Angeles, London or Dubai.

THE PENINSULA

Historical site

Muslims pray and stand in front of graves of Muslims killed during the Battle of Uhud, at Mount Uhud, north of the holy city of Madinah, yesterday.

MIDDLE EAST 07SUNDAY 13 JANUARY 2013


Many killed in hostage rescue bidPARIS: At least one French soldier died and 17 Islamists were killed in a failed bid to free a French hostage held in southern Somalia since 2009, the French defence minister said yesterday.

The operation to free the secret agent, with the alias of Denis Allex, was launched by France’s elite DGSE secret service, Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said in a statement.

“All indications are (that Allex was) killed by his captors,” Le Drian said, add-ing that one French pilot was killed and another soldier was missing. He had ear-lier spoken of two dead troops.

But the Shebab extremists denied Le Drian’s assertion that they had killed the hostage, adding that they would decide his fate in two days and issuing a stern warn-ing to Paris.

“In the end, it will be the French citizens who will inevitably taste the bitter conse-quences of their government’s devil-may-care attitude towards hostages,” a Shebab statement said.

Le Drian said the raid in Bulomarer, some 110km south of the Somali capital Mogadishu, was sparked by the “intran-sigence of the terrorists who have refused to negotiate for three and a half years and were holding Denis Allex in inhuman conditions.”

French President Francois Hollande expressed his a great distress over the deaths and extended his condolences to the families of victims.

Sheikh Mohamed Abdallah, a local Shebab military commander, said: “Mujahedeen fighters defeated the so-called commandos of the French government who tried to rescue a hostage, and they (the commandos) left the bodies of several of their own at the site of the attack.”

Abdallah is the commander of Bulomarer. The Shebab statement said the French car-ried away “several” of their dead.

“The helicopters attacked a house ... upon the assumption that Denis Allex was being held at that location, but owing to a fatal intelligence blunder, the rescue mis-sion turned disastrously wrong.

“Several French soldiers were killed in the battle and many more were injured before they fled from the scene of battle, leaving behind some military parapherna-lia and even one of their comrades on the ground.

“The injured French soldier is now in the custody of the mujahedeen and Allex still remains safe and far from the location

of the battle,” it said. A Bulomarer resi-dent, Idris Youssouf, said: “We don’t know exactly what happened because the attack took place at night, but this morning we saw several corpses including that of a white man.

“Three civilians were also killed in the gunfight,” he said.

Allex was kidnapped in Somalia in July 2009 along with a colleague who was freed the following month.

Four military helicopters were used in the raid in Shebab-controlled Bulomarer, witnesses said.

The Al Qaeda linked Shebab lost their main strongholds in the south and centre of the country following an offensive launched in mid-2011 by an African Union force, but they still control some rural areas.

Allex is among nine French hostages in Africa of whom at least six are held by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

He appeared in a video in June 2010 appealing to Paris to drop its support for the Somali government. He last appeared in another video in October looking gaunt and calling on Hollande to work for his release. Somalia has not had an effective central government since 1991.

However, a new administration took office last year, ending eight years of transitional rule by a corruption-riddled government. AFP

France loses pilot in air raid on Somali town; hostage likely dead in operation

Somali pirates free three Syrian hostages without ransomMOGADISHU: Somali pirates have released three Syrian hostages held in captivity since 2010 without payment of any ransom, government officials said yesterday.

The three were part of the 19-strong crew of a Panama-flagged, United Arab Emirates-owned bulk cargo vessel cap-tured in December 2010 some 400 miles northeast of the Seychelles. The ship was

released in October 2012 after pirates said they received $400,000, but detained six of the crew to get more money for them.

The pirates who had held the three were pardoned, Mohamed Aden Tiicey, president of the government of Adado region, said by phone.

“No ransom was paid. We had agreed with pirates to surrender, hand over

weapons and release the hostages with-out ransom,” Tiicey said.

Hostage Muayad Walio said he and his companions in captivity were in good health. “I am very happy. We got our freedom after about two years and one month,” hostage Muayad Walio said.

Tiicey and a former pirate, Abdiqadir, accompanied the three released hostages to Mogadishu.

“We have taken these three Syrian hostages from the pirates-the other crew had been previously released,” Abdiqadir said.

Abdiqadir is the son of a former pirate kingpin known as Mohamed Abdi Hassan “Afweyne”. He and his father now both work with the Addado region.

A UN Monitoring Group report on Somalia in 2010 said that “Afweyne”

commanded bandits in the Arabian Sea and off the Indian Ocean coast of East Africa for almost a decade, raking in mil-lions of dollars in ransom payments.

Somalia, which is only now getting a functioning government after two dec-ades of chaos and civil war, is next to the Gulf of Aden’s busy shipping lanes. Poverty and lawlessness have lured many young men into piracy. REUTERS

Bahrain Shias protest jailing of 13 activistsMANAMA: Thousands of Shias demonstrated near Manama yesterday in a new protest against an appeals court upholding jail terms for 13 activists on charges of plotting to overthrow Bahrain’s rulers, witnesses said.

“We will not resign ourselves to it” and “we will not forget the prisoners,” shouted demonstra-tors during the peaceful protest that was monitored by a heavy security presence. Some carried photos of those convicted.

On Monday, the Court of Cassation upheld sentences rang-ing from between five years and life in prison against the 13, who took part in 2011 anti-government protests. They were convicted by a military tribunal on charges that included “setting up terror groups to topple the regime,” and were later retried in a civilian court.

Hours after the ruling, hun-dreds of people gathered in the Shia village of Malkiya in support of the prisoners.

Since February 2011, Bahrain has been shaken by opposition protests that the authorities of the Sunni-dominated kingdom say are being fuelled by Shia Iran across the Gulf. At the time, the main Shia opposition move-ment Al-Wefaq called the verdict political. AFP

Amnesty concerned over Tunisia draft charterTUNIS: Amnesty International expressed con-cern yesterday over Tunisia’s draft constitution, saying the text contains ambiguous provisions that fail to uphold international human rights standards.

The rights watchdog made

the comments on the eve of a meeting of the National Constituent Assembly and ahead of the second anniversary tomorrow of the overthrow of Tunisian strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Amnesty said it called on the NCA to “ensure that the new

constitution fully safeguards human rights and conforms to Tunisia’s obligations under international human rights law.” Noting that the the NCA was due to discuss a second draft of the charter today, it urged the body to “seize the opportunity.” AFP

A man talks to a Somali soldier who was among several who boarded a pick-up truck that was targeted with a roadside bomb near a street in Mogadishu yesterday. According to witnesses, one soldier was injured in the explosion which targetted the pick-up truck belonging to a Somali lawmaker.

Hosni Mubarak questioned over gifts worth millions CAIRO: Egypt’s ousted presi-dent Hosni Mubarak was yes-terday questioned over gifts worth millions of Egyptian pounds allegedly received from the country’s flagship state newspaper, a judicial source said.

Mubarak, who is already serv-ing a life sentence for his involve-ment in the death of protesters during the 2011 uprising that top-pled him, was ordered detained for 15 days pending the investiga-tion, the source said.

According to the official MENA news agency, Mubarak received gifts worth seven million Egyptian pounds ($1m) from the Al-Ahram press foundation between 2006 and 2011 when he was ousted.

The ailing 84-year-old presi-dent has appealed the life sen-tence and a court will look into the appeal today.

He was acquitted of previous corruption charges on a techni-cality, but his two sons who were on trial with him, are facing fresh fraud charges.

Several Mubarak-era ministers and officials are currently in jail for corruption.

Mubarak is currently being treated at a military hospital, where he was moved from prison, suffering from cracked ribs and fluid in the lungs.

Meanwhile, unknown attack-ers threw petrol bombs at tents housing protesters outside the Egyptian presidential palace in Cairo yesterday, injuring dozens of people, witnesses said.

A reporter saw several tents on fire and ambulances driving away from the scene late yester-day evening.

A doctor in one of the ambu-lances said that dozens of people had been injured, including police officers.

Protesters opposing an Islamist-backed constitution have been camped outside the resi-dence of President Mohammed Mursi for weeks.

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The other side

08 VIEWS SUNDAY 13 JANUARY 2013


Editorial

France wins and loses

THE ANSAR Dine militant group in Mali yesterday warned Paris that French citizens in the Muslim world would be targeted after about 100 Islamists were killed in a battle for the town of Konna.

The Al Qaeda-linked rebel group has been grabbing headlines since early last year as fighting raged in one of the most peaceful countries in Africa, thrusting it into a whirlwind that even threatened its rich archaeological heritage. In response to the militant group’s threat, French President Francois Hollande last evening announced tighten-ing security across the Republic. France’s anti-terrorism alert system ‘vigipirate’ was in action amid reports that security on public trans-portation and other strategic spots and buildings was being tightened.

The Islamist rebels who had taken control of a large part of northern Mali early last year were defeated by Bamako troops backed by the French air force. The Malian army said that it had fully reclaimed the town after a land and air attack. With its strategic role in helping recapture the Malian town — Hollande — often thrust into the heat of domestic politics and bilateral upheavals, has shown his prowess.

Not only did France enjoy the African Union’s backing in wrest-ing the town under siege by rebels, it also tried to throw its weight in another country in Africa. However, elite French troops were not so lucky in Somalia. In an attempt to free a French hostage captured by Islamists in 2009, commandos mounted an air raid on a southern

Somali town. However, the botched raid claimed the life of the hostage and a French pilot, who was part of the special operation. Seventeen Islamists were also killed in the air raid.

If Mali made the French Republic proud, it was Somalia that led to its undoing. On another front, Hollande also came under fire from Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who questioned the Socialist French premier’s meeting with a Kurdish rebel. What Erdogan wanted to know from the occupant of the Elysee Palace was quite justified? It is rather strange that Hollande hobnobbed with a member of a group that has been designated as a terrorist organisa-tion by the European Union.

It seldom happens that a nation is hailed and walloped on different fronts on the same day, as it happened with France yesterday.

The victory of Malian troopers over Islamists in one of the most vola-tile regions in Africa has been hailed. However, Russia again proved to be the fifth columnist. Moscow said that the fate of any African country in a conflict should be decided by the people of the continent. However, the intricacies of international law notwithstanding, the French move seems laudable. Not only has the recapture of the town weakened the Islamists in that part of Africa, it has also brought into focus the role an important foreign colonial power can play in bringing peace to an embattled continent.

The French head of state must explain immediately

to the French, Turkish and world public why ... he is in communication with these

(PKK) terrorists.Quote ofthe day

Paris’ win against Islamists in Mali has been dampened by the botched rescue

attempt in Somalia.

The pullout roadmapRecep Tayyip ErdoganTurkish Prime Minister

BY TIM FLANNERY

THIS SUMMER, life in Australia resembles a compulsory and very unpleasant game of

Russian roulette. A pool of hot air more than 1,000 miles wide has formed across the inland. It covers much of the continent, and has proved astonishingly persist-ent. Periodically, low pressure sys-tems spill the heat towards the coast, where most Australians live. At Christmas it was Perth. Then the heat struck Adelaide, followed by Tasmania, Victoria, and southern New South Wales and Canberra. Over this week-end, it’s southern Queensland and northern New South Wales that look set to face the gun. And with every heatwave, the incidences of bushfires and heat-related deaths and injuries spike.

Australians are used to hot summers. We normally love them. But the conditions pre-vailing now are something new.

Temperature records are being broken everywhere. At Leonora, in the Western Australian inte-rior, it reached 49C this week – the national high – and just one record temperature among many. The nation’s overall temperature record was set on 7 January. Then the following day that record was exceeded, by half a degree celsius.

The breaking of so many tem-perature records indicates that Australia’s climate is shifting. This is supported by analysis of the long-term trend. Over the past 40 years we’ve seen a decline in the number of very cold days, and the occurrence of many more very hot days. All of this was pre-dicted by climate scientists dec-ades ago, and is consistent with the increasing greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere.

The new conditions have seen the Bureau of Meteorology add two new colour categories to Australia’s weather prediction maps. Temperatures of 48-50C used to be the highest, and where

such extremes were anticipated, the weather map was marked black.

Over the last week, purple patches have begun to appear on some maps. They mark tempera-tures above 50C. Pink, which is yet to be deployed, will denote temperatures above 52C.

Climate extremes have a way of stacking up to produce unpleasant consequences. Two years ago, the ocean temperature off northwest-ern Australia reached a record high, and evaporation of the warm seawater led to Australia’s wettest year on record.

This was followed, in central Australia, by the longest period without rain on record. The veg-etation that had thrived in the wet now lies dried and curing, a perfect fuel for fires.

With abundant fuel and increased temperatures, the nature of bushfires is changing. Australians have long rated fire risk on the MacArthur index. On it, a rating of 100 – the conditions

that prevailed in the lead-up to the devastating 1939 bushfires – represents “extreme” risk. But after the 2009 fires a new level of risk was required. “Catastrophic” represents a risk rating above 100. Under such conditions fires behave very differently. The Black Saturday fires of 2009, which killed 173 people, were rated at between 120 and 190. They spread so fast, and burned so hot, that the communities they advanced upon were utterly helpless.

The superheated air currently monstering the continent is fickle. This week, Sydneysiders watched in relative thermal comfort as those living just 100km to the south endured scorching heat, blustering winds, and unstoppa-ble fires. The forecast for com-ing days indicates that Sydney might once again be lucky, with the worst fire conditions striking 50km to the north of the city. But, of course, things might work out differently.

The unprecedented conditions

of recent weeks have seen many Australians rethinking their atti-tude to climate change. A good friend of mine farms just outside Canberra.

A few years ago the drought was so severe that his 300 year-old gum trees died of thirst. Then the rains came on so violently that they stripped the precious topsoil, filling his dams with mud and sheep droppings.

This week he watched as his cousin’s property at Yass was reduced to ashes. When I called he was trying to secure his own historic homestead and outbuild-ings from fire. He asked me if I thought the family would still be farming the area 50 years from now. All I could say was that it depended upon how quickly Australia, and the world, reduced their greenhouse gas emissions.

Australia’s average tempera-ture has increased by just 0.9 of a degree celsius over the past century. Within the next 90 years we’re on track to warm by at least

another three degrees. Having seen what 0.9 of a degree has done to heatwaves and fire extremes, I dread to think about the kind of country my grandchildren will live in. Even our best agricultural land will be under threat if that future is realised. And large parts of the continent will be uninhabit-able, not just by humans, but by Australia’s spectacular biodiver-sity as well.

This week’s extreme conditions have once again raised the politi-cal heat around climate change. The Greens party condoned an anti-coal activist who created a false press release claiming that the ANZ bank had withdrawn support for a major coal project, causing its share price to plunge. Meanwhile the acting leader of the (conservative) opposition, Warren Truss, said it was simplis-tic to link the hot spell to climate change, and “utterly simplistic to suggest that we have these fires because of climate change”.

THE GUARDIAN

THE US-Afghanistan summit has made tangible progress. In an era of uncertainty and waywardness, as the Coalition forces were seen groping in the dark, the news that Washington is ready

to pull out its troops at an early date, than agreed as per schedule, and would like to re-engage in a different role — as nation-builder is quite promising. President Barack Obama and his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai surprisingly backed holding of talks between the Afghan government and the Taleban, which hints at progressive thinking in an attempt to search for a political solution. This new pledge for reconciliatory talks, coupled with the assurance to withdraw combat troops well before 2014, could fall well in the scheme of things that the Pakhtoon militia wanted as preconditions. The need of the hour is now to choreograph their moves in a better manner so that the initiative to find an amicable way out is never lost at the hands of brinkmanship.

While Obama has dispensed with his long-term electoral resolve to pull out of the war-torn country, the meeting in Washington is no less than a consolation prize for Karzai who seems to have got a legitimacy shot, as he has been mandated to reach a political settlement with his adversaries. Earlier, it was an equation of Karzai toeing the Brussels and Pentagon line in which the West was averse to any deal with the Taleban. Such a bizarre approach had literally derailed the momentum of reciprocity that the Taleban had showed last year by sending in their second-tier leadership for talks in Qatar and Paris.

The Americans are in need of taking a couple of more steps that should come to reflect that the Afghan government is in command of things, and is no more a tutelage to foreign dictates. Release of all political prisoners or, at least, handing them over to authorities in Kabul, including the detainees in Guantanamo Bay and concentration camps in Bagram, is indispensable. Similarly, Kabul and Washington are in need of entering into a bilateral arrangement, on the terms Japan enjoys with the US, stipulating that Afghanistan’s reconstruc-tion and its stability shall remain the corner stone of White House foreign policy.

After a decade of chaos, misgovernance and instability, the region of Southwest Asia is in need of institutional measures that should see consolidation of a new Afghanistan free from interference and occupa-tion. Not only the West but also the regional countries have a stake in ensuring Afghanistan’s vibrancy and independence. This Obama-Karzai agreement should see the light of the day in letter and spirit.

KHALEEJ TIMES

As Australia burns, attitudes are changing. But is it too late?

Cartoon Arts International / The New York Times Syndicate

VIEWS 09SUNDAY 13 JANUARY 2013


The strange thing about the internet is that it went from being some-thing exotic to some-

thing mundane almost without us noticing it. As a consequence, our societies have become fright-eningly dependent on a system that almost nobody understands, and that nobody — except for techie types — thinks about very much. It has become the elec-tronic plumbing of our world, with the difference that we pay far more attention to our actual plumbing than we do to its virtual counterpart.

In fact we take it for granted. We regard the internet as hav-ing almost magical properties and as essentially limitless. Someone comes up with a bright idea — for example internet telephony or VoIP, as it’s called — and adds it to the things that the network is expected to do. And the net-work obliges, with the result that many voice calls are now handled by the network. Same story with e-commerce, streaming media, file-sharing, social networking, web mail, and all the other online services that we now assume to be among the appurtenances of civi-lised life. We assume that we can continue to add tasks of greater and greater complexity to what the network already does and that it will continue to deliver.

It is extraordinary to think that a network designed to facilitate communication between a few hundred research laboratories and a few hundred researchers could have scaled up to the point where two billion people now use it, and where large swathes of our commercial life depend upon it. In large measure, this is a trib-ute to the ingenuity of its original architecture. Its designers were faced with a tricky problem: how to design a network that was as future-proof as possible? Their solution was based on two core principles: there should be no cen-tral ownership or control; and the network should not be optimised for any particular application. It should be a simple-minded system that essentially did only one thing — take in data packets at one end and do its best to deliver them to their destinations at the other. “Dumb network, smart applica-tions” was the mantra that they used to express the philosophy that all of the ingenuity should be left to those people developing applications at the edges of the network.

These turned out to be very good ideas. They enabled the “organic” growth of the network to happen. And they triggered an explosion of creativity as smart people thought up clever applica-tions that the network could be used for. Some of these applica-tions (for example the web) were

beneficial; some (viruses, worms, and malware generally) were destructive. And many (file-shar-ing) were somewhere in between. The consequence was that, over time, a network that was origi-nally seamless and uncluttered came to be overlaid with a gro-tesque accumulation of add-ons and patches, to the point where it begins to resemble a baroque excrescence rather than a clas-sical design.

This is beginning to concern some people whose job it is to worry about these things. Some find the baroque complexity of the contemporary internet offen-sive on geeky-aesthetic grounds, much as modernists detest the excesses of Victorian architec-ture. But others — notably one of the original internet architects, David Clark of MIT — worry that the higgledy-piggledy evolu-tion of the network means that it is now intrinsically fragile and may therefore be prone to catastrophic failure. Sometimes, Clark says, the worst disasters are caused not by sudden events but by slow, incremental processes that humans are good at ignoring. “Things get worse slowly. People adjust. The problem is assigning the correct degree of fear to dis-tant elephants.”

Clark’s fear is that some of those distant elephants are closer than we think. He sees evidence in things like “plunging security” and the network’s decreasing abil-ity to accommodate new technolo-gies. And he thinks that the only way forward is to rethink the architecture of the network from the ground up.

A good many computer scien-tists have been worrying about this for at least a decade, funded by bodies like the US National Science Foundation, which has put upwards of $300m into the quest for a “new” internet design incorporating some of the things — such as security and authenti-cation — that the original archi-tects didn’t worry about (partly because they were designing a system for researchers who knew and trusted one another).

It all sounds eminently reason-able, but there are two bluebot-tles in the ointment. The first is whether or not we are already in too deep — that we are too dependent on the network in its current form to be able to do a root-and-branch reconstruction of it.

The second is the concern that a new network architecture, with all its desirable “security” fea-tures, might stifle the creativity that the old, open and uncon-trolled, network enabled. And if that happened, we really would have thrown out the baby with the bathwater.

THE GUARDIAN

BY JOHN DICKERSON

President Obama is in a flap. His administra-tion, like the movie The Hobbit, doesn’t have enough women in

key roles. The last three White House staff announcements have featured the following people: John Kerry, Chuck Hagel, John Brennan and Jack Lew. All white dudes. The New York Times ener-gised elite conversation on this topic with a photograph on the front page of Wednesday’s paper. In it Obama addresses a semi-circle of 10 male aides and cabi-net officials (the coalition of the besweatered). They are arrayed in precise formation, as if to block out senior adviser Valerie Jarrett who is barely visible in the pic-ture. (She is so hard to find, CNN used a special shading to identify her leg.)

The president’s men are irri-tated by this criticism. The focus on this momentary snapshot, they argue, ignores the more complete picture. If that is so, they have only themselves to blame.

During the campaign, the pres-ident and his allies took every opportunity to pander to women voters, and never let a moment

pass — whatever the pretext — to draw broad conclusions about Mitt Romney’s lack of concern for women. When a Romney aide didn’t have an immediate answer about the candidate’s position on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, it was portrayed as a dire sign. It wasn’t just Romney’s shortcom-ings that created the conditions now bruising Obama. The rapid twitch to all things related to women and the relentless court-ing created a supercharged politi-cal atmosphere. When Hillary Rosen, a Democratic strategist unrelated to the Obama campaign, made a clumsy remark about Ann Romney “never working a day in her life,” Obama’s top strategist David Axelrod and campaign manager Jim Messina denounced her immediately so as not to offend women. The most uninten-tionally hilarious moment came at a White House forum on women and the economy. The event was intended to show women voters, who are particularly sensitive to the weak economy, that the president cared about them. The forum was clearly treating women as an interest group. So, it was chuckle-worthy when the presi-dent declared, “Women are not an interest group.”

Since re-election, the Obama administration has not shrunk from playing the gender card. White House officials repeatedly asserted that UN Ambassador Susan Rice’s critics were only beating up on her for Benghazi controversy — and not the president or the CIA director — because she was a woman. That is what the president appeared to be suggesting when he said Republicans were picking on Rice because she was an “easy target.” If people are now drawing grand conclusions based on a few staff picks, it’s because the Obama team helped train them to do so.

The recent staff picks also link with a critique that has some validity. We’ve heard since the early days of the Obama admin-istration that the inner circle has a male bias. We know this: If Barack Obama were facing a third election at least one of his top players at State, Defence, or Treasury would be held by a woman. Needing suburban women voters, the president just couldn’t afford to have a cabinet where one of the faces most likely to be in the news cycle every day was not a woman.

But let’s not go overboard. The power of symbolism needs to be

balanced against the practical effect of that symbolism. To put it into perspective, as my Slate colleague David Weigel pointed out, let’s imagine John McCain had won in 2008. We would have gotten to know Vice President Sarah Palin! And the policies she supported would have been far different for women than those supported by Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, who drafted, for example, the Violence Against Women Act. President John McCain wouldn’t have signed the Lilly Ledbetter Act. It’s a bit too neat to correlate women in power with policies good for the broad swathe of women.

It’s also amusing that Valerie Jarrett is the one hiding in that New York Times photo because it was The New York Times Magazine that helped promote the valid notion that Jarrett — an African-American woman — is the presi-dent’s most powerful adviser. Who are the two administration officials you have heard the most about in the last few months? Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice. Clinton has been the biggest rock star of the Obama cabinet. If the president were such a brute, you’d imagine there would have been lots of stories about gender bias

as he tried to rein in his top dip-lomat. There haven’t really been any.

Obama elevated UN Ambassador Susan Rice to cabi-net rank. When John Kerry recently got the nod for the State Department job, it was almost a diversity pick. He will be the first white male to hold that job in 16 years.

When Susan Rice’s name was being bandied about for State, the repeated assertion from admin-istration sources was that the president was thinking about her because he trusted her. After all, he’d picked her to be his top foreign policy adviser in his first presidential campaign. When Rice withdrew her name, several administration aides strongly hinted that when the national security adviser post opens up, she’ll top the list.

Rice and Clinton are just a cou-ple of the powerful women who have been in the Obama orbit. There’s also Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano, outgo-ing Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis and outgoing EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. The president’s top lawyer and top domestic

policy advisers are also women. Obama named two women to the Supreme Court, one of whom was his former solicitor general in the Justice Department — a branch headed by an African-American man — and the other who was the first Hispanic woman named to the court. The Supreme Court arguably plays a more lasting role in determining gender and ethnic fairness in American society than any cabinet post.

The Obama staff directory is a binder full of women. The White House itself employs more women than men. As The New York Times notes, about 43 percent of Obama’s appointees have been women, about the same proportion as in the Clinton administration, but up from the roughly one-third appointed by George W Bush.

In the end, the only thing that has really changed so far from Obama’s first term is that the president intends to replace Hillary Clinton with a man. There are more cabinet picks to come, which conceivably could increase the percentage of women in the final tally. Then we’ll see if the second Obama administration is as bad for women as Middle Earth.

WP-BLOOMBERG

Barack Obama’s white dude problems

India’s current outpouring of anger is unprecedentedLet’s hope that the public revulsion in Delhi over the recent gang rape case leads to proper punishment of such crimes.BY IAN JACK

When she came to hear of the cru-elty in Bhagalpur, Indira Gandhi,

then India’s prime minister, said she felt physically sick. “What has this country come to?” she asked the parliament in Delhi on November 30, 1980. “How can anybody do this to their fellow men?” In Bhagalpur, 1,287km east of the capital, police had been systematically blinding people by poking out their eyes with bicycle spokes or burning them with acid. At least 30 men had been blinded in this way. It had been going on for many months, and stopped only after an anti-government newspaper, the Indian Express, broke the story.

I went to the town soon after to interview the eyeless. How they had been blinded was easily described: policemen had pressed them to the floor of a police station and poked or poured into their eyes until they fainted. “Why?” was the harder question. The local answer was that they were all dacoits, or bandits who belonged to a caste notorious for its crimi-nality. But why blind them? Why not simply shoot them, which in this part of India might have eas-ily been arranged by a well tried method known as the “police encounter”, whereby the dead offi-cially get killed in an exchange of gunfire. A local tradition of pun-ishment may have been partly to blame. The medical superintend-ent at Bhagalpur jail said police would usually deliver two or three blinded criminals a year — it was the recent “epidemic” that was unusual. Perhaps they were meant as walking advertisements for police power. None of the fac-tors thought to explain turbulence in other parts of India seemed to

apply: economic rivalries, conflict-ing religious identities. “From the outside, Bhagalpur seems like pure sadism,” I wrote at the time, and though that was horrifying, it was not the most surprising aspect of the affair.

That came with the protests that swept through Bhagalpur when Gandhi’s government awarded each blinded man about £1,000 in compensation, and sus-pended 15 policemen. Students and lawyers marched through the streets; traders shut up shop; a mob straddled the railway line and brought trains to a halt. Their sympathies were not with the victims, but the perpetra-tors. They were demonstrating in favour of a police force which, as they saw it, had made their town safe against dacoits who might chop off a woman’s arm to steal her bangles or knife a shopkeeper in the course of raiding his shop. Where was the compensation for their misfortunes, people wanted to know. Why hadn’t Gandhi thought about them?

So far as I remember, those were the only demonstrations prompted by the Bhagalpur blind-ings. It would be fair to say that the rest of India was shocked by the blindings, but also that the shock came nowhere near the present torrent of anger and demand for social change that has followed the gang rape and death of a 23-year-old medical student in Delhi. India

was a different country then, of course. Its few radio and TV sta-tions were government-owned, and most of its newspapers rather austere. Bhagalpur was remote and difficult to reach from the big cities, and only a few report-ers went. Visually, in that age of black-and-white photography and poor Indian newsprint, all the blindings amounted to were a few grey images of men with bandaged heads, or empty sockets where their eyes should have been. In Delhi this month, crowds have called for public executions and chemical castration, but 30 years ago the demand that Bhagalpur’s sadists be punished was confined to a few newspaper editorials. Only one or two police officers served any considerable time in jail.

Accounting for the difference in popular reaction between 1980 and now, however, goes beyond the arrival of 100 satellite chan-nels, Facebook and Twitter. There is the question of recognition: the demonstrators in Delhi identified with a victim who was part of their burgeoning urban, aspiring class, and might have been one of them, or their wife, girlfriend or sister. There is the question of social-cum-geographical dis-tance: alleged criminals from a low caste in a faraway town in a then notoriously backward state, Bihar, were much less likely to attract sympathy or prolonged attention, however startling the

cruelty inflicted on them. Finally, there is the question of feminism.

In the late 1970s, when I first came to India, the repression of women was easily ignored by the male outsider. The country’s prime minister, after all, was a woman, and it was men who were said to have suffered most dur-ing her period of emergency rule, when some were forcibly steri-lised. Women could travel safely in big cities after dark — though Delhi was an exception. Even in daylight on Delhi’s buses, women got molested — grabbed, rubbed up against, leered at — but the press trivialised these assaults by char-acterising them as “Eve-teasing”. Women journalists, newsreaders and academics, a prime minister in a sari: surely the great struggle was largely historic, its great vic-tories the abolition of suttee and the widows’ remarriage act of the 19th century?

The commotion in Delhi might begin to change that. It would be foolish to think of the rape victim as a martyr in a cause – victims are victims – but enough protest and self-examination might one day mean that rape is punished even in the dustiest town, even when committed by the police, which would be a marvellous thing; especially marvellous if the police didn’t beat up, blind or oth-erwise torture the suspects they had taken into custody.

THE GUARDIAN

Internet architecture needs rethinking

Demonstrators react as police unleash water cannon during a protest calling for better safety for women following the rape of a student, in front of the government secretariat and presidential palace in New Delhi.

10 MIDDLE EASTSUNDAY 13 JANUARY 2013


Strong show ofsupport for Iraqi prime ministerBAGHDAD: Hundreds of demon-strators rallied in central Baghdad yesterday to back Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki, as the latest in weeks of anti-government rallies in Sunni areas of Iraq called for him to quit.

The demonstrations have wors-ened a political crisis that pits Maliki against his erstwhile govern-ment partners, with the premier facing accusations of authoritarian-ism and sectarianism ahead of key provincial polls.

At Tahrir Square in the heart of the capital, demonstrators held up posters of the prime minister along-side banners that read: “I am Iraqi, I love Maliki,” and “We strongly sup-port Nouri Al Maliki.”

Many shouted in unison: “All the people support Nouri Al Maliki”.

In a sign of increasing sectarian rhetoric at the rallies, many demon-strators held up banners describing themselves as “followers of Hussein,” a revered figure in Shia Islam. A speaker led the crowd in chants of “Labeika Ya Hussein,” or “We will follow you, Hussein”.

Banners also blamed parliament speaker Osama Al Nujaifi, a Sunni Arab opponent of Maliki, for militant attacks.

Demonstrators said the pre-mier should resist demands for a wide-ranging prisoner amnesty and reform of anti-terror laws, both of which are key demands of

anti-government protesters. “In the names of all the martyrs, the victims, the widows, we call on the government not to cancel Article 4,” said one protester, a 67-year-old who gave his name as Abu Hussam, referring to a widely cited article of Iraq’s anti-terror law.

Abu Hussam said his son was killed by gunfire in Baghdad in 2006.

“He was 20, I was about to get him married. For six years, I have not slept, I hope one night I can sleep.”

Dozens of people also took part in a pro-government rally in the southern port city of Basra, a journalist said.

Meanwhile, anti-government ral-lies blocked a key highway linking Baghdad to Jordan and Syria for a third week. Protests were also held in Samarra, Tikrit, Baiji and Mosul, all Sunni-majority areas north of the capital.

The demonstrations have decried alleged misuse of anti-terror laws to wrongfully hold members of their community, and claim they are being targetted by the Shia-led authorities.

In the longest-running of the protests, in western Anbar prov-ince, tribal leaders called for Maliki to resign.

“We want Maliki to fall, because he has insulted our dignity many times,” said Ali Al Hatem, a leader of the powerful Dulaim tribe. “We will not leave until you find a replacement for Maliki. Then we can negotiate.”

AFP

Reaction against anti-govt rallies

Iraqi policeman frisk people at Tahrir Square in central Baghdad yesterday. Thousands of supporters of Maliki took to the streets in Baghdad to support the government and refuse the demands of anti-Maliki protesters.

Fresh clashes in Tunisia over living conditionsBEN GUERDANE, TUNISIA: Clashes again broke out yesterday between residents and police in Ben Guerdane near Tunisia’s bor-der with Libya after nearly a week of demonstrations over poor living conditions.

Ben Guerdane, around 30km from the border, has witnessed sporadic unrest since Sunday, fuelled by Tripoli’s decision to close the Ras Jdir border cross-ing in early September for secu-rity reasons.

Dozens of youths, many of them masked, gathered outside the police station, which was torched on Thursday, and threw stones at police who responded

with tear gas, a journalist reported.

By late afternoon the police-men evacuated the station to seek shelter in the headquar-ters of the national guard, and a tense calm spread over the region.

The protesters hurled abuse at the ruling Islamist Ennahda party, whose local headquar-ters were also ransacked this week. A customs office was also torched.

“Ben Guerdane is Free! (Prime Minister Hamadi) Jebali out!” the protesters chanted, two days ahead of the second anniversary of the revolution that sparked off the

Arab Spring. The latest dem-onstration came as representa-tives of the authorities, trade unions and local tribes met in Ben Guerdane in an attempt to thrash out a solution to the crisis.

But Amar Hamdi, who heads the local branch of Tunisia’s main trade union confedera-tion, the UGTT, said the talks had foundered, and blamed the government.

“The authorities say this is a security problem, but we want development projects” for the region, Hamdi said, denounc-ing the fact that “no member of the government has come to Ben Guerdane to try to

resolve the problem.” Despite the border crossing being reo-pened on Thursday, the local UGTT branch went ahead with a general strike in the town to demand investment and jobs, with only chemists, hospitals and bakeries remain-ing open.

“We don’t want Ras Jdir reo-pened — we want development,” one protester in Ben Guerdane said yesterday.

There is ongoing social dis-content in Tunisia two years after the uprising that over-threw dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, with strikes and pro-tests often degenerating into violence. AFP

Israeli premier seeks court nod to remove Palestinian tentsE1, WEST BANK: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday he was seeking court approval to remove an outpost of Palestinian tents pitched in an area of the occupied West Bank that Israel has ear-marked for a new settlement.

Israel’s Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the Palestinian outpost, built in the geographi-cally sensitive area known as E1, could remain for six days while the issue of its removal was being discussed.

Netanyahu’s pledge last November to build settlements on E1 caused an outcry, with

European diplomats warn-ing that it could kill off any hope of creating a contiguous Palestinian state.

The prime minister’s office said in a statement yesterday that the government was peti-tioning the court to retract its ruling on the outpost, and had instructed security forces to block off roads leading to the rocky desert terrain.

A group of Palestinian law-makers was refused entry. But others who came from nearby villages made the long trek up the hillside northeast of Jerusalem to join scores of protesters who have erected 20

large, steel-framed tents in an effort to preserve the land for a future Palestinian state.

The encampment’s name, “Bab el Shams”, which means “Gateway to the Sun” in Arabic, was taken from a novel by Lebanese writer Elias Khoury which tells the history of the Palestinians through a love story. The writer called the protesters in solidarity.

Hanan Ashrawi, a top Palestine Liberation Organisation official, said Israeli forces had prevented her from entering the compound with other lawmakers.

REUTERS

Turkey asks Hollande to explain PKK meet

ISTANBUL: Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan yesterday demanded French President Francois Hollande explain why he had met one of three Kurdish militants shot dead in Paris this week.

The execution-style killings at an institute in central Paris on Thursday cast a shadow on a new initiative by Erdogan’s govern-ment to launch a peace process to end a 28-year-old insurgency by the Kurdistan Workers Party’s (PKK) that has claimed more than 40,000 lives.

Hollande told reporters he and other politicians knew one of the three women, who all had ties to the PKK. Erdogan pledged to con-tinue efforts to end the conflict.

REUTERS

Syrian soldiers loyal to President Bashar Al Assad are seen in Khan Al-Hariri district in Aleppo yesterday.

Russia rejects Assad ouster preconditionMOSCOW/BEIRUT: Russia voiced support yesterday for international peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi but insisted Syrian President Bashar Al Assad’s exit cannot be a precondition for a deal to end the country’s conflict.

Some 60,000 Syrians have been killed during the 21-month-old revolt and world powers are divided over how to stop the escalating bloodshed. Government aircraft bombed outer districts of Damascus yesterday after being grounded for a week by stormy weather, opposition activists in the capital said.

A Russian Foreign Ministry statement following talks on Friday with the United States and Brahimi reiterated calls for an end to violence in Syria, but there was no sign of a breakthrough.

Brahimi said the issue of

Assad, whom the United States, European powers and Gulf-led Arab states insist must step down to end the civil war, appeared to be a sticking point at the meeting in Geneva.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry said: “As before, we firmly uphold the thesis that questions about Syria’s future must be decided by the Syrians themselves, with-out interference from outside or the imposition of prepared reci-pes for development.”

Russia has been Assad’s most powerful international backer, joining with China to block three Western-and Arab-backed UN Security Council resolutions aimed to pressure him or push him from power. Assad can also rely on regional powerhouse Iran.

In Geneva, Russia called for “a political transition process” based on an agreement by for-eign powers last June.

Brahimi, who is trying to build on the agreement reached in Geneva on June 30, has met three times with senior Russian and US diplomats since early December and met Assad in Damascus.

Russia and the United States disagreed over what the June agreement meant for Assad, with Washington saying it sent a clear signal he must go and Russia contending it did not.

Moscow has been reluctant to endorse the “Arab Spring” pop-ular revolts of the last two years, saying they have increased instability in the Middle East and created a risk of radical Islamists seizing power.

Although Russia sells arms to Syria and rents one of its naval bases, the economic ben-efit of its support for Assad is minimal. Analysts say President Vladimir Putin wants to pre-vent the United States from

using military force or support from the UN Security Council to bring down governments it opposes.

However, as rebels gain ground in the war, Russia has given indications it is preparing for Assad’s possible exit, while continuing to insist he must not be forced out by foreign powers.

Opposition activists say a mil-itary escalation and the hard-ship of winter have accelerated the death toll.

Yesterday, the skies were clear and jets and helicopters fired missiles and dropped bombs on a line of towns to the east of Damascus where rebels have pushed out Assad’s ground forces, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Rebel forces have acquired more powerful anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons during attacks on Assad’s military bases. REUTERS

INTERNATIONAL 11SUNDAY 13 JANUARY 2013


BAMAKO,: Mali’s army reclaimed a key town from Islamists yesterday after France sent in its air force, opening a dramatic new phase in the con-flict with the battle killing more than 100 people, including rebels and government soldiers.

After France launched air raids to support Malian ground troops fighting to wrest back the town of Konna, Burkina Faso and Niger both announced they were sending 500 troops to join a regional force tasked with ousting the Al Qaeda-linked Islamists, who have occupied the vast desert north since March last year and had threatened to advance on the capital.

The Malian army said it was in full control of Konna after the battle, which witnesses and the military said had killed dozens of Islamist fighters — making it one of the worst clashes since the start of the crisis and the most significant setback inflicted on the Islamists.

France’s Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said “Operation Serval” had already suffered its first French casualty when a pilot carrying out air raids was killed on Friday. US officials said Washington might support France’s sudden military inter-vention, while Nigeria also said it had dispatched personnel on the ground.

Russia’s Africa envoy, Mikhail Margelov, lashed out at the French move, saying: “African residents aside, no one else can or should solve the continent’s problems. I understand the cur-rent situation in Mali, but I think however that any operation in Africa can and should only be done under the aegis of the UN and the African Union.”

But Malian residents thanked France for its support. “The French really saved us,” said Moussa Toure in the capital, Bamako — a remark echoed by others, including Mali’s interim president.

France also said it had deployed troops in Bamako to protect its 6,000-strong expatriate commu-nity. The capital has remained under government control throughout the crisis, which erupted in the wake of a March 22 coup that ousted democrati-cally elected president Amadou Toumani Toure.

A senior Malian officer said the army was now fully in control of Konna, after spending the best part flushing out the last pock-ets of resistance. “We control the town, all of it,” said Lieutenant Ousmane Fane. “We have claimed dozens of casualties, even around 100 among Islamist ranks in Konna,” he said.

Witnesses spoke of dozens of

French gunships stop Mali Islamist advanceMore than 100 killed in fighting

A French Mirage 2000 D aircraft flying over Mali after taking off from the French military base of N’Djamena, in Chad.

bodies strewn across the area, with one resident counting 46 dead Islamists. The town, which had fallen into insurgents’ hands on Thursday, is some 700km from Bamako but was seen as one of the last ramparts against an Islamist advance.

Mali’s armed forces had been in disarray since the March coup and seemed powerless against a rebellion of seasoned fighters, but France’s shock intervention tipped the power balance.

“The helicopters struck the insurgents’ vehicles, which dis-persed. The army is mopping up the city,” a Malian military source said. Groups with ties to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) overpowered a secular ethnic-Tuareg rebellion in March 2012 and seized control of the north, a territory the size of France.

They have since destroyed centuries-old Muslim mauso-leums which they see as a her-esy and imposed an extreme

form of Islamic law in the main towns, f logging, amputating and sometimes executing accused transgressors. The collapse of a nation formerly seen as a democratic success story in the region also sparked Western fears that northern Mali could become a major launchpad for global terrorist attacks.

The United States, France — which has eight hostages in the Sahel — and the rest of the European Union had looked set

to let regional nations take the lead on any military interven-tion, which appeared at least several months away.

The UN Security Council had approved a military mission organised by west African bloc ECOWAS, but Mali’s interim administration later warned it could not afford to wait months for a game-changer.

“Our choice is peace... but they have forced war on us. We will carry out a crushing and mas-sive retaliation against our ene-mies,” Mali’s interim president, Dioncounda Traore, said in an address on Friday. Yesterday, he thanked France for its intervention.

French President Francois Hollande, who has struggled on the domestic front and seen his popularity hit record lows, said French forces would remain involved as long as necessary.

He sent the UN Security Council a letter asking for plans to send the 3,300-strong African force to be sped up. Nigeria’s presidency confirmed it had sent an air force technical team and the commander of the planned ECOWAS force to Mali.

“The technical staff from the Nigerian air force are already on the ground in Mali,” Nigerian presidency spokesman Reuben Abati told AFP. “They are not fighters; they are tech-nical staff.”

AFP

CARRICKFERGUS: Police in Northern Ireland fired plas-tic bullets and water cannon on Friday as pro-British loyalists furious over restrictions on flying the British flag torched a bus and hurled petrol bombs at officers.

Violence also flared in towns outside the capital Belfast as loyalists — the Protestant com-munity’s working-class hardcore — blocked roads around the prov-ince to express their anger.

Northern Ireland has been swept with a wave of sometimes violent protests since December 3, when Belfast City Council voted to restrict the number of days the British flag is flown at City Hall to 18 per year.

Most of Friday’s province-wide protests were peaceful,

with demonstrators taking the flag onto the streets, but seri-ous disorder broke out in the towns of Newtownabbey and Carrickfergus, just north of Belfast. Police fired water cannon and five plastic bullets at rioters after they were attacked with a total of 33 petrol bombs, as well as fireworks and masonry.

Four officers were injured, with one requiring hospital treatment, police said, bringing the total number of officers injured since December to around 70.

Two early arrests were made. Loyalists have taken to the streets most nights since the Belfast City Hall ruling. They see the coun-cil’s decision to restrict the flying of the flag as an attack on their identity and an unacceptable

concession to republicans seeking a united Ireland. In the seaside town of Carrickfergus, dozens of armoured police vehicles drove in to restore order after around 100 protesters threw bricks, bottles and fireworks and torched plastic trash bins.

In the shadow of Carrickfergus Castle, rubble littered the junction of Irish Gate and West Street. Groups of youths in tracksuits lingered as police in riot gear with plastic shields stood by.

One Carrickfergus man blamed the disorder on youths from Belfast who had travelled north on the train. “I could see them from my house coming out of the station, young guys aged 15 or 16,” he said.

AFP

LONDON: Around 50 victims of sexual abuse by Jimmy Savile are set to seek damages from the late broadcaster’s estate and from organisations including the BBC and Britain’s health service, their lawyer said yesterday.

A report by British police on Friday said Savile “groomed the nation” over six decades, hiding behind his fame to assault girls, boys and adult women on BBC premises and in schools and hospi-tals. Liz Dux, a lawyer representing more than 50 of Savile’s victims, said that because Savile had died in 2011 aged 84, civil claims were the only way that they could get justice.

“Compensation is not at the forefront of their mind, but of course it’s the only method of recompense that we can get for them now, given that he can’t be prosecuted,” she said.

Dux said they would consider making claims against Savile’s heirs, against the BBC — the publicly funded broadcaster that made Savile one of its biggest stars in the 1970s and 1980s — and the state-run National Health Service. “We now have to look at what was known in the organisations. Once these inquiries have taken place then we will be able to make progress with the civil claims.

“Those inquiries are hugely important to the evidence and it will be foolhardy to press ahead straight away with the civil claims now without that evidence coming forward. A moratorium has been agreed in respect of the major-ity of the potential defendants to await the outcome of the inquiry.”

AFP

WASHINGTON: Vice President Joe Biden wrapped up a series of White House meetings on Friday and prepared recommendations to curb US gun violence that will call for expanded background checks on gun buyers and set up a heated, likely uphill battle in Congress to revive a ban on mili-tary-style assault weapons.

Biden, who heads a task force due to give US President Barack Obama recommendations next week, met with representatives of the video game industry, whose products often enable players to carry out shootings in graphically violent games.

The vice president has said he will recommend “universal” back-ground checks for all gun buyers - endorsed as a top priority on Friday by the prominent gun-con-trol group the Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence - and new limits on the capacity of ammuni-tion magazines.

Obama formed the Biden task force following last month’s mas-sacre in Newtown, Connecticut in which a gunman shot dead 20 children and six adults at an elementary school.

The White House reiterated on Friday that it also will try to revive the US ban on assault weapons that expired in 2004 after being in effect for a dec-ade. The Obama administration rejected suggestions it was trying to lower expectations for getting a broad ban on assault weapons approved by Congress.

“The president has been clear that Congress should reinstate the assault weapons ban and that avoiding this issue just because it’s been politically difficult in

the past is not an option,” White House spokesman Matt Lehrich said.

Biden’s recommendations are likely to put the White House on a collision course with the influen-tial National Rifle Association gun rights lobbying group and spark the biggest gun-control fight in Congress in nearly a decade. The NRA criticised the White House effort after meeting with Biden on Thursday.

Any gun control proposals face a difficult fight in Congress, both in the Republican-led House of Representatives and in the Democratic-led Senate, where many Democrats represent con-servative states with broad public support for gun rights.

Gun control advocates have renewed hope that a package of gun restrictions could clear Congress, while acknowledging the assault weapons ban likely will face the toughest path. “Among the things that are under consideration, ban-ning assault weapons is probably the hardest lift for Congress. Bans are always the toughest fight,” said Jim Kessler, senior vice president of policy at the centrist think tank Third Way.

NRA President David Keene predicted that any proposal to ban assault weapons would not survive in Congress. He said his group has a “profound disagree-ment” with Obama on the right approach to preventing incidents such as the one in Newtown. The NRA has proposed putting armed security guards in U.S. schools.

“I do not think that there’s going to be a ban on so-called assault weapons in Congress,” Keene said. REUTERS

SYDNEY: Firefighters were battling scores of wildfires raging in Australia yesterday, as a government commission warned that climate change had raised the risk of scorching heat waves becoming more frequent.

In the eastern state of New South Wales, some 1,000 fire-fighters were attempting to douse about 94 wildfires, about dozen uncontained, while fires were also burning in neighbouring Victoria and Queensland states.

And in the southern island state of Tasmania, known for its cooler temperatures, residents were returning to the burnt-out homes they fled a week ago when flames raced through villages on the Tasman peninsula.

No deaths have been reported from the bushfires, which have flared during extreme summer temperatures, but the unprec-edented heatwave has prompted the government’s Climate Commission to issue a new report on the weather event.

It says that climate change has contributed to making the extreme heat conditions—in which record-breaking tempera-tures in parts of the country have topped 45 degrees Celsius — and bushfires worse. “The length, extent and severity of the cur-rent heatwave are unprecedented in the measurement record,” the report “Off the Charts: Extreme Australian summer heat” notes.

“Although Australia has

always had heatwaves, hot days and bushfires, climate change is increasing the risk of more fre-quent and longer heatwaves and more extreme hot days, as well as exacerbating bushfire conditions.”

It says while many factors influence the potential for bush-fires, so called “fire weather” is highly sensitive to changes in climatic conditions. And hotter temperatures, longer heatwaves, high winds and drier soils and grasses can all dramatically exac-erbate fire conditions.

“Thus when fire occurs in more extreme weather conditions, there is the potential for the fire to be far more intense and dif-ficult to control,” the report said.

AFP

WASHINGTON: A gov-ernment report warned on Friday that the United States could face more frequent severe weather including heat waves and storms for decades to come as temperatures rise far beyond levels being planned for.

The draft Third National Climate Assessment, a scientific study legally mandated to advise US policy makers, made few bones that carbon emis-sions have been causing climate change — a source of controversy among some lawmakers.

“Evidence for climate change abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans,” the study said. “The sum total of this evidence tells an unambiguous story: The planet is warming.”

The study, which was submitted for public and expert review and could be revised, said there was “strong evidence” that human activity had already roughly doubled the probability of extreme heat of the kind seen in Texas and Oklahoma in the summer of 2011.

The assessment expected temperatures to keep ris-ing and offered different scenarios for the future — including temperatures rising between 2.8 and 5.6 degrees Celsius after 2050 if emissions climb further.

AFP

Biden gun proposals may spark fight in Congress

Savile’s abuse victims set to seek damages

Bus torched in fresh Northern Ireland riots

US study warns of extreme heat, more storms

Bushfires rage in key Australian states

12 ASIA / PHILIPPINESSUNDAY 13 JANUARY 2013


19 kids among 46 dead in China landslide$3,200 compensation for each victimBEIJING: A desperate search for three people missing in a landslide in southwestern China ended yesterday when their bodies were pulled from the mud, taking the final death toll to 46 — many of them children.

Authorities in Yunnan prov-ince said that the last three bod-ies were recovered yesterday morning after a night of frantic efforts by more than 1,000 rescue workers to locate the final miss-ing residents of the remote village of Gaopo.

Xinhua said those buried included 27 adults and 19 chil-dren. Authorities said families will receive 20,000 yuan ($3,200) in compensation for each victim.

Two other people were hospi-talised after the landslide struck on Friday morning, engulfing 16 homes, bringing a thunder-ous crash and throwing up thick clouds of dust, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Rescuers toiled into the night, braving bitter wind and freezing temperatures, using lamps and specialised detection devices in the hope of locating the missing, Xinhua said.

Soldiers, police, firefighters and mine rescue workers joined the search operation, using 20

excavators and trucks, it added.Li Yongju, 50, said she heard

the crash of the landslide while cleaning her yard and rushed with other villagers to the disas-ter site with shovels and hoes.

“We pulled out several peo-ple, one of whom was breathing weakly. But after a while, he died,” Xinhua quoted Li as saying.

Zhou Benju, wept as she recounted hearing the rumble of the landslide.

“Several relatives of my parents — my grandma, brother, uncle and my aunt’s family members, died,” she told the agency.

The landslide was caused by 10 days of heavy rain and snow, steep slopes, unstable soil, and earth-quakes that jolted the area in September, according to local geo-logical experts, Xinhua reported.

The area may also have been weakened by the presence of a nearby coalmine, the daily Chongqing Chenbao said, although this was denied by a local official at a press conference broadcast on national television.

The area has experienced unu-sually low temperatures in recent weeks during what authorities have called China’s coldest winter in 28 years.

The landslide spread over an

Rescuers search for buried victims after a landslide hit Zhenxiong county, Yunnan province of China, yesterday.

area 120 metres long, 110 metres wide and 16 metres deep, accord-ing to authorities.

Hundreds of thousands of mes-sages of support have been posted on microblogging site Sina Weibo.

“Pray for those who remain missing in the debris. Life is too fragile. We only wish miracles can happen!” read one post.

“It is a tragedy, a real tragedy!” wrote another on Sohu.com.

Photos on Yunnan Web, run by the Yunnan provincial gov-ernment, showed rescuers in orange uniforms digging into wide swathes of mud against a back-drop of snow-covered, terraced hills.

A video posted on a Chinese

social networking site appeared to show a group of villagers digging through thick mud and debris to uncover a body, which was carried away on a stretcher.

The Communist Party’s top leaders Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, along with Premier Wen Jiabao, ordered “all-out efforts to rescue victims”, Xinhua said.

Yunnan province, which borders Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam, is a rela-tively poor part of China where rural houses are often cheaply constructed.

Gaopo is in Zhenxiong county, in the northeast of Yunnan, a temperate province known for its tobacco industry and for being

the home of Pu’er tea.But its mountainous areas are

prone to landslides and earth-quakes. Two quakes in September — one of magnitude 5.7 — left 81 dead and hundreds injured.

A neighbouring county was hit by a landslide in October that killed 18 children, after one that killed 216 people in 1991, according to the United States Geological Survey.

An earthquake in neighbour-ing Sichuan province in 2008 claimed around 70,000 lives — the worst natural disaster to hit China in three decades, with shoddy buildings blamed for the high toll.

AFP

Sri Lanka draws flak over chief justice impeachmentCOLOMBO: International criti-cism mounted yesterday over a move to impeach Sri Lanka’s chief justice, with Britain demanding protection for the incumbent and the beleaguered legal profession in the former colony.

Britain added its voice to the United States in expressing deep concern over parliament’s over-whelming vote on Friday night to sack Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake following a contro-versial trial by ruling party MPs.

“The motion to impeach the

Chief Justice runs contrary to the clear rulings of Sri Lanka’s highest courts and the proceedings appear to contravene basic principles of fairness,” the British foreign office said in a statement issued by the high commission in Colombo.

It said the rushed trial of the chief justice violated “due proc-ess and respect for the independ-ence of the judiciary” and the Commonwealth principles on rule of law and good governance.

“Together with our inter-national partners, we call on

the Sri Lankan government to respect democratic principles and the right to peaceful pro-test and to ensure the continued safety of Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake.”

A spokesman for President Mahinda Rajapaksa said in the next few days he was expected to ratify parliament’s vote to impeach Bandaranayake, 54, the country’s first woman to hold the highest judicial post in the island of 20 million people. A replace-ment is to be named next week,

but the Lawyers’ Collective, which includes most of the 11,000 lawyers in the country, have said they will not recognise a new appointee and urged other judges to follow suit.

The privately-run Weekend FT reported the disputed parlia-mentary vote under the heading: “Chief ’s justice denied.”

But the state-run Daily News defended the sacking with an edi-torial headlined: “It’s over, and the future is bright!”

Former foreign minister and opposition spokesman Mangala

Samaraweera described the impeachment as a final blow to democracy in a country emerging from a decades-long Tamil sepa-ratist war and a state of emer-gency lasting 28 years.

“Up to yesterday at least we kept up appearances of being at least a nominal democracy. But as of Friday night, the Rajapakse government sheds the facade and the country becomes a pariah of the international community,” Samaraweera said.

AFP

Govt to move 100,000 squatters from ManilaMANILA: The Philippine gov-ernment plans to move about 100,000 squatters from their homes on crucial waterways in Manila by June as a flood con-trol measure and for their own safety, an official said yesterday.

The plan is to clear six major waterways in the sprawling capi-tal before typhoon season starts in June, while also saving the squatters from being washed away by floods, said Interior Undersecretary Francisco Fernandez.

Experts have long warned that flooding in Manila has been wors-ened by the squatter communities who build precarious shanties on the banks of waterways, prevent-ing water from flowing freely and blocking drains with rubbish.

Fernandez said there were an estimated 105,000 squatter fami-lies living on the waterways of the capital. The 20,000 families — representing about 100,000 people — living in the six major waterways would be the first to be moved.

“Forced evacuations will only be taken as a last resort,” said Fernandez, whose office is in charge of informal settlers.

He said the government was already meeting those affected so they could be relocated to areas near their old homes or at least in or near the capital.

In the past, he said, squat-ters relocated outside the capi-tal swiftly returned to their old homes because they could not find jobs at the relocation site.

The government has already allocated 10bn pesos ($246m) for the project this year and is pre-paring “medium-rise buildings” as new homes for the squatters, Francisco said.

Urban planners have said the clogging of waterways by squat-ters is one cause of frequent flooding and deaths in the capi-tal caused by storms like Typhoon Ketsana in 2009.

In recent months, squat-ter communities have violently resisted relocation efforts but Francisco said those on the waterways realised they had to move.

“They are there in the water-ways not because they want to be, but because they have no other choice,” he said.

AFP

29 killed, 12 hurt in Nepal bus crashKATHMANDU: At least 29 people were killed and 12 injured when a bus veered off a narrow mountain road in thick fog in western Nepal yesterday, a police officer said.

The vehicle tumbled 2,000 feet down a steep hill in Doti district at 2am (2015 GMT) after the driver lost control on the road to the southwestern plains bordering India, said Nara Bahadur Air, an officer in Doti.

“Twenty-nine passengers have been killed in the crash. Twelve passengers who have been seri-ously injured are being treated in hospital, 50km from the site,” said Air.

The bus had 35 passengers reg-istered at its last checkpoint but drivers on rural routes tend to pick up passengers on the way and police suspect the death toll could rise much higher when the crash site in Chhatiwan village is searched.

“The area where the accident occurred has light forest cover... We don’t know the cause of the accident yet but locals have told us that it was foggy during the night,” Air said.

Police were called when a man driving by the crash sight heard the screams of survivors, around half an hour after the crash, he added. “We have deployed 50 policemen but they have told us the rescue efforts have been ham-pered because the bus is stuck on a precipice.”

Accidents are relatively com-mon on Nepal’s highways because of poor roads, badly maintained vehicles and reckless driving, and death tolls running into double figures are frequent.

AFP

Aquino keeps gun despite outcryMANILA: Philippine President Benigno Aquino may continue to carry a gun despite an impending ban on bearing firearms in the run-up to polls, an election official said yesterday.

Gun ownership is a sensitive topic in the Philippines, where calls are growing for tighter controls or an outright ban in the aftermath of a series of shootings starting on New Year’s Eve that have left 23 people dead.

The ruling by the official Commission on Elections exempted Aquino, a gun enthusiast and competitive shooter, on the basis that he is constitutionally the head of the military.

“We have exempted the members of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and since the president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, then by necessary implication, (the exemption) covers the president,” said Emil Maranon, an offi-cial in the commission.

Presidential spokeswoman Abigail Valte hailed the ruling, saying, “we welcome the (commission)

statement that as commander-in-chief, President Aquino is exempted”.

The ban, which takes effect today and will be in place for six months, is intended to minimise violence ahead of local and congressional elec-tions in May.

It is not unusual for local officials to seek exemption from gun bans, which are routinely imposed before elections, but Maranon said this was the first time he could recall a president applying.

Speaking before an anti-crime group on Saturday, Aquino said the government was study-ing whether the problem was lack of gun control laws or just poor enforcement.

“Is the problem about licensed gun owners, or lawless elements? Will a total gun ban really deter kidnappers, murderers, and robbers.... Is it a question of passing new legislation or more strictly implementing existing laws?” he said.

AFP

Relatives mourn over the coffin of Filipino girl, Stephanie Nicole Ella, seven years old, who died after being hit by a stray bullet during the New Year revelry, at her funeral in Caloocan city, east of Manila, yesterday.

Afghan sport

Afghan horsemen compete for a goat carcass during a game of Buzkashi in Herat yesterday. The ancient game of Buzkashi is an Afghan national sport and involves two teams of horsemen competing to throw a goat carcass into a scoring circle.

WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama said yesterday that the US goal in Afghanistan was “within reach” as he vowed to move ahead with a timetable to end the 11-year-old military campaign and focus on a broad domestic agenda.

“We’ve pushed the Taliban out of their strongholds,” Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address. “And our core objective — the reason we went to war in the first place — is now within reach: ensuring that Al Qaeda can never again use Afghanistan to launch attacks against America.”

The comments came after Obama wrapped up talks with visiting Afghan President Hamid Karzai, promising to speed up a transfer of lead security responsi-bility from Nato to Afghan forces this spring, in a sign that the pace of US troop withdrawal could quicken.

After meeting with Karzai, Obama said Nato forces would have a “very limited” role in the coun-try after 2014 and insisted that Washington had achieved its prime goal of “decapitating” Al Qaeda.

The leaders met at a crucial moment in the final chapter of a long, bloody war, and as Obama balances the future security of Afghanistan with US combat fatigue and a desire to spend America’s dwindling resources at home.

Obama, planning the with-drawal of most of the 66,000 US troops left in Afghanistan, said that after 2014, American forces would have a “very limited”

mission in training Afghan forces and preventing a return of Al Qaeda.

“This week, we agreed that this spring, Afghan forces will take the lead for security across the entire country, and our troops will shift to a support role,” the US presi-dent said. “In the coming months, I’ll announce the next phase of our drawdown. And by the end of next year, America’s war in Afghanistan will be over.”

Obama said that now Americans faced difficult domestic tasks of taking care of returning veterans, growing the economy, shrinking budget defi-cits, creating new jobs and boost-ing family incomes.

“We have to fix our infrastruc-ture and our immigration sys-tem,” he noted.

“We have to protect our planet from the destructive effects of cli-mate change — and protect our children from the horrors of gun violence. These, too, will be dif-ficult missions for America. But they must be met.”

The White House has ordered the Pentagon to come up with plans for a smaller future Afghan presence than generals had expected, perhaps num-bering 3,000, 6,000 or 9,000 US troops.

Obama’s domestic political opponents, however, charge he is in a rush for the exit and warn that a minimal force could squan-der gains hard won in a war that has killed more than 3,000 coali-tion troops.

AFP

QUETTA: Shia families refus-ing to bury their dead after twin bombings in Pakistan’s troubled southwestern city of Quetta vowed to continue their sit-in protest yesterday until the army takes over security.

By late evening, initial crowds of hundreds of protesters had swelled to several thousand, all gathered on the main road near the snooker hall hit by Thursday’s twin suicide attacks.

Hundreds of women and chil-dren were among the demonstra-tors, braving the severe cold as they stood alongside more than 60 coffins carrying victims’ shrouded bodies.

Refusal to bury the bodies is an extreme position in Islamic

society, where the dead are nor-mally buried the same or next day, but families say they will not leave until the authorities agree to put the security and administration of the city under army control.

Sunni militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi claimed responsibility for the bombings, which took place in an area dominated by Shia Muslims from the Hazara ethnic minority and killed 92 peo-ple, with 121 wounded.

It was the worst ever sectarian attack on Shias, who account for around 20 percent of Pakistan’s 180 million population.

“The government machinery has failed, there is no protection for people in Quetta,” local Shia party official Hashim Mausawi

said. “We will not end our pro-test until we get an assurance that the Pakistan army will take over security and administrative control in Quetta.”

Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf had sent federal minister Khurshid Shah to hold talks with Shia community leaders, senior administration official Hashim Ghilzai said.

A Shia party leader, Agha Ashraf Zaidi, said: “We discussed our one-point agenda — deploy-ment of army in Quetta. The min-ister sought time and promised to contact us later after discussing it with the prime minister.

“We have made it clear that we will not leave this place nor will we bury the

bodies until our demand is met.”He called for the provincial

government to be sacked and the army to launch an operation to arrest and punish the killers.

“We are forced to take this hard decision,” another Shia leader Daud Agha said. “We real-ize there is a problem in keeping the dead bodies in the open for so long but our concern now is the safety of those who are alive.”

In a separate protest, more than 500 workers and support-ers of the Hazara Democratic Party gathered outside the office of the provincial police chief in Quetta as its leader Abdul Khaliq went on a three-day hunger strike against lack of security.

AFP

US to speed up Afghan troop transitionLimited role for Nato after 2014

Angry Pakistani Shias refuse to bury dead

QUETTA: The United States has condemned the “sense-less and inhumane” extremist attacks in Pakistan after a day of bomb blasts that killed 126 people and sparked angry pro-tests by Shia Muslims.

Two suicide bombers killed 92 people and wounded 121 when they targeted a crowded snooker club in the southwestern city of Quetta Thursday, in an area dom-inated by Shia Muslims from the Hazara ethnic minority.

US State Department spokes-woman Victoria Nuland on Friday said Washington offered “the families of those killed in these brutal attacks in Quetta, in Swat, in Karachi... our deepest condolences”.

“We obviously stand with the people of Pakistan in strongly condemning these senseless

and inhumane acts,” she added.“We remain concerned about

extremist violence of any kind in Pakistan and remain committed to working with the government of Pakistan to combat terror.”

Extremist Sunni militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi claimed responsibility for what was the worst ever sectarian attack on Shias, who account for around 20 percent of Pakistan’s 180 million population.

Hundreds of Shias staged a sit-in at the devastated snooker hall on Friday, refusing to bury loved ones until the army takes respon-sibility for security in Quetta from paramilitary and police officers.

The government in Baluchistan province, which is also fighting a separatist insurgency, announced three days of mourning, but the protesters squatted on the road

alongside around 30 bodies draped in shrouds and placed in coffins.

It was the deadliest attack in Pakistan since suicide bombers killed 98 people outside a police training centre in the northwest in 2011 -- an assault claimed by the Pakistani Taliban.

Meanwhile, unidentified men fired rockets on Nato containers carrying goods for international troops operating in Afghanistan, killing one person and destroying at least five vehicles in the Hazar Ganji area on the outskirts of Quetta on Friday.

“A group of at least 12 uniden-tified men attacked the terminal and fired rockets, which triggered a massive fire and gutted five out of 10 containers parked there,” senior local police official Hamid Shakeel said.

He said that the attackers

escaped after also shooting dead an employee at a nearby petrol pump. A local police official Noor Bukhsh Mengal also confirmed the incident.

Earlier Thursday, a bomb deto-nated under a security force vehi-cle in a crowded part of Quetta, killing 11 people and wounding dozens.

A bomb at a religious gather-ing in the northwestern Swat val-ley killed 22 people and wounded more than 80, the deadliest inci-dent in the district since the army in 2009 fought off a two-year Taliban insurgency.

At the snooker club, the first bomber struck inside the building then, 10 minutes later, an attacker in a car blew himself up as police, media workers and rescue teams rushed to the site, said police officer Mir Zubair Mehmood.

Police official Hamid Shakeel put the death toll at 92.

Lashkar-e-Jhangvi claimed responsibility in telephone calls to local journalists. The group has links to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and was involved in the kidnap and beheading of reporter Daniel Pearl in January 2002.

The attacks, coupled with vio-lence in the northwest, revived warnings from analysts that Islamist militancy could threaten national elections, expected some time in May.

Polls would mark the first time an elected civilian govern-ment in Pakistan, for decades ruled by the military, completes a term in office and is replaced by another democratically elected government.

AFP

KARACHI: A number of local companies in Pakistan have started armouring passen-ger vehicles following demand driven by the deteriorating law and order situation in the country.

With many industrialists, cor-porate executives, politicians and government officials opting for bulletproof vehicles because of an increasing sense of insecurity, the business of armouring looks all set to boom.

Mansoor Ahmed, General Manager (Technical) of Omar Jibran Engineering Industries, said his company had armoured 75-80 passenger vehicles, includ-ing four-wheel drive vehicles and sports utility vehicles, from 2009 to 2012.

He said the company, which has been producing plastic and sheet metal parts for vehicle manufac-turers in the country for decades, had established an armouring division for passenger vehicles.

The company was procuring materials from the United Arab Emirates, the United States, South America and Australia for bulletproofing vehicles, he said.

“There is a huge demand from customers to armour their vehi-cles, but vehicle owners need to get an NOC (no objection certifi-cate) from the Interior Ministry, and without NOC the company does not armour the vehicle. We are now turning four to five high engine power vehicles into bul-letproof ones, besides securing orders for 10-15 more vehicles,” he said.

Giving an example, he said a car can be armoured at a cost of Rs3m, which covers floor tops, doors, pillars, glasses, fuel tank, and the front and rear portions.

If a person wants to get his vehicle made bulletproof abroad, it would cost more than Rs10m, which includes shipment costs and taxes, he added.

INTERNEWS

Pakistan’s foreign ministry gets rap over spendingISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s foreign ministry and its over-seas missions spent Rs90.483m during 2004-06 on furnish-ing offices with new furniture and carpets and buying lux-ury cars, computers and gifts without fulfilling mandatory formalities.

Auditors’ objections about the spending have been presented to the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), sources said yesterday.

A report by the Auditor General of Pakistan (AGP) said public money had been spent hastily and in an ill-considered manner merely because it was available or to avoid the lapse of grants.

“A rush of expenditure, par-ticularly in the closing months of the financial year, is regarded as a breach of financial regularity,” it said.

The report said the audit had observed that the spending on furniture, fixtures, machinery and equipment had been done with-out inviting tenders and obtain-ing sanction from the competent authority.

The ministry had been one of the most spendthrift govern-ment departments which needed to enforce financial discipline on its officers, it said.

AGP Buland Rana said the main issue was wasn’t how much money the ministry had spent exclusively on furnishing its offices and providing vehi-cles to its staff overseas, but the attitude.

“In many instances, one can see that the ministry went ahead with a shopping spree without fulfilling formalities, believing that an ex-post facto approval of the expenditures will not be a problem,” he said.

Rana said the mission in Brussels spent Rs10m on buy-ing furniture during 2005-06. “I cannot understand what was the emergency behind buying new furniture that the mis-sion couldn’t wait for its formal approval.”

INTERNEWS

Shia Muslims display the unburied coffins of victims of Thursday’s twin bomb attacks during a sit-in in Quetta, yesterday. The burials were scheduled to take place after Friday prayers but the bodies would remain unburied until Shias receive promises of protection, participants of the sit-in said.

Washington condemns ‘inhuman’ attacks in Pakistan

Insecurity fuels demand for bulletproof vehicles

13PAKISTAN / AFGHANISTAN SUNDAY 13 JANUARY 2013


14 INDIASUNDAY 13 JANUARY 2013


Kumbh Mela

A Hindu priest holds an oil lamp while performing evening prayers near the banks of river Ganges ahead of the Kumbh Mela (Pitcher Festival), in Allahabad yesterday. Kumbh Mela will return to Allahabad in 12 years.

LUCKNOW: With crimes against women in the national spotlight, the country’s most populous state reported as many as 23 rapes in the first 10 days of the new year, with three victims burnt for spurning or resisting their male attackers.

Most incidents took place in western and central parts of Uttar Pradesh and as many as 70 percent rapes were reported from villages and small towns, accord-ing to official statistics.

Director General of Police A C Sharma is pitching for more stringent laws for crimes against women. “Even one reported rape or assault on women is a shame,” Sharma said.

A 16-year-old girl was set on fire when she foiled a rape attempt in Shankargarh in Allahabad dis-trict. She suffered more than 70 percent burns and is still battling for life. The victim told police that she tried her best to save herself from her neighbour and attacker, 20-year-old Gyan Patel.

She accused his parents of helping him in the attack. Police officials admitted they were hor-rified to hear the story. “Incidents of rape are shameful, but cases of victims being stabbed and burnt alive are indeed very shocking,” Deputy Inspector General of Police Navneet Sikera said.

He said that in the thousands of complaints reaching the women’s

helpline from across the sprawling state, many complained of being threatened by boys and men.

A 17-year-old girl was set on fire by a jilted lover in Hathras on the last day of 2012. Police got the complaint Jan 1. After four days, she succumbed to her burns.

Police said she was attacked inside her house when the assail-ant, Arjun, barged in and doused her with kerosene. He then set her on fire before the family could come to her rescue. The distraught father of the deceased told police that his daughter had spurned the overtures of the killer who had been stalking her. The man has been arrested.

In Farukkhabad district, a

14-year-old girl was set on fire by a young man, Shrawan Jatav, after he failed to rape her. She suffered 70 percent burns. Superintendent of Police Nilabjo Chowdhary said that the girl’s condition was criti-cal and that the assailant and his family members were absconding.

In another similar incident, a 19-year-old suffered multiple stab wounds after she resisted a thug’s attempt to rape her. Fatehpur Superintendent of Police Rajendra Singh said the incident took place in Karera village when the victim was going to the fields.

When she raised an alarm, the man, Vijay, stabbed her many times and escaped after firing gunshots in the air. She is out of

danger, and police are looking for Vijay. An official attributed the rise in such violence to demands to send rapists to the gallows. “With the fear of being identified, the rapists are now trying to do away with evidence by trying to kill the victim,” the officer said.

In the last nine months since the Samajwadi Party came to power, a total of 1,497 rape cases have been reported in Uttar Pradesh. Police spokesman Rakesh Singh says incidences of rape have fallen compared to last year. He added that police were doing their best to nail people with records of crime against women and sexual assault.

IANS

Crimes against women on the rise in UP State reports 23 rapes in the first 10 days of this month; three victims burnt

NEW DELHI: Three people, including a B.Tech student, were arrested in with three separate cases of attempt to rape and molestation here, police said yesterday.

A six-year-old girl was safely rescued from the clutches of a 24-year-old man who had abducted her from her house in east Delhi’s Seelampur on Friday night. Hearing the screams of the girl, people in the area caught the accused, identified as Wasim, just few metres away and beat him up before handing him over to police.

In another incident, a 21-year-old B.Tech student, identified as Nitesh, was arrested on Friday for allegedly trying to rape a 15-year-old girl inside her house in west Delhi’s Alipur. He was a resident of the same area. “The accused was beaten up and handed over to police after being caught red-handed,” said a police officer, add-ing that a case has been registered.

In the third case, a 20-year-old youth, identified as Omi, was arrested on Friday night for molesting a girl in New Friends Colony market in south Delhi. “Another friend of the accused, Tushar, managed to f lee from the spot when the victim raised an alarm,” said a police officer. The accused has been booked for his offences. IANS

Three arrested for rape and molestation in New Delhi

BADAUN /NEW DELHI: In a village in India’s Uttar Pradesh state, a woman sits hunched on the ground in a green shawl, vis-ibly weak and shivering in the January cold. She says she has not eaten for days, and neither have her five young children.

She has never heard of Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, having never ventured further from her village than a nearby market town, and ekes out a living working in potato fields on other people’s land.

Her eldest son left home when he was 11. He never returned, and the woman thought he was dead. The first news she got of him was when police from New Delhi turned up at her brick hut to say he had been arrested for the gang rape and death of a student.

In an interview with Reuters, the mother of the juvenile, the youngest of six members of the gang accused of the attack, recalled the son who left home five or six years ago for the bright lights, and seemed stunned by the accusation against him.

“Today, the infamy he earned is eating me up,” his mother said as villagers stood and stared. “I can’t even sit with two other people in the village because of the shame that my son has brought to the family.”

A 23-year-old physiotherapy student was beaten and raped on a moving bus in the capital on December 16. She was left bleeding on a highway and died two weeks later from internal injuries. The five men who have been charged with rape and murder are all expected to plead not guilty. One says police tortured him.

The sixth member of the gang, the woman’s son, is being

processed as a juvenile and has not been charged. He will be tried separately. Police have said they are conducting bone tests to determine his age as they sus-pect he may be over 18 years old. Reuters is withholding his name for this story. The trial of the five men is due to start within weeks.

It is from a life of rural penury that the youth sought to escape, one of about two million Indians who migrate to cities every year, chasing an economic boom that has propelled India for the past two decades but has trickled down slowly to its poor.

Conversations with relatives, neighbours and police show the extent to which the accused lived on the margins of the city’s emerging prosperity, holding menial jobs and living in a slum. Their lives stand in contrast with that of the victim.

She was also from a humble background but funded her stud-ies by taking a job in one of the call centres that are a hallmark of modern India’s economy and have helped build an aspirational new middle class.

According to his mother, the youth joined a group of other vil-lage boys travelling to New Delhi, found work in a roadside eatery and - for the first year - used to send Rs600 ($11) a month back to his family. After he stopped sending money, his mother never heard from him again. At first she thought he might have been forced into bonded labour. Later, she presumed he was dead. A cou-ple of months before the rape, she consulted a holy man about her son, whom she remembered as a good boy. “The holy man told me that someone has practiced some black magic on him, but that he

Mother of rape accused in shock

Ravidas camp, the slum where four of the six accused by police in the Delhi gang rape case, reside, in New Delhi.

would come back,” she said.The details of the boy’s life

after he left his village are patchy. Even his fellow accused did not know his real name and called him by an assumed name, a senior police officer told Reuters. Police described him as a “freelancer” at a Delhi bus station, cleaning buses and running errands for drivers.

“He was a helper on buses who would solicit customers by calling out to them in a sing-song tone,” the officer said. He was popular with the contractors who ran the bus services and frequently changed jobs. It was during this time that he met Ram Singh, the main accused in the case, whom he had gone to meet on the day of the attack in the hope of get-ting back money that Singh had borrowed from him, police said.

The juvenile went to Singh’s house to claim Rs8,000 ($150) but Singh invited him to stay for food instead, according to a police report. After the attack, police say

they found the juvenile’s blood-stained clothes on Singh’s roof.

The friend of the victim who had accompanied her on the bus, and who was also beaten, said the juvenile had beckoned the pair to board. Singh and three of the other accused lived in a poor pocket in the otherwise largely middle-class Delhi neigh-bourhood of R K Puram, whose wide streets and tree-lined boul-evards contrast with the dark lanes, communal taps and open sewers where Singh lived. Many of the people who live there are migrants, working as electri-cians, auto-rickshaw drivers, day labourers, bus drivers, mechanics and street vendors.

The world of the juvenile’s mother is still one where carts drawn by horses and bullocks ply the lanes, and dung cakes are stacked in villages to be used as a fuel. But in the cities, the old barriers of caste and gender are being eroded as India prospers.

It is in this world that Vinay Sharma, another of the accused, wanted to make his mark, and aspired to the kind of life that the victim was striving for.

Passionate about boxing and body-building, Sharma earned $55 a month as a helper in a gym and wanted to enrol on a corre-spondence course, according to his mother and neighbours in the slum where he lived. “He always used to say ‘I will make it big in life’,” said his mother, Champa Devi.

Like the juvenile and the vic-tim, Sharma’s family is originally from Uttar Pradesh. “When the police came around 4 or 4.30 in the evening, he was at home”, his mother said. “I ran after him when they were taking him away. They would not even tell me why. Even he kept insisting ‘Ma, go back home, nothing will happen to me. They are just taking me to ask some questions. I will be back soon.’ But that was the last I saw of him.” REUTERS

Pending anti-sexual harassment bill is useless: Activists NEW DELHI: While the gov-ernment has assured a stronger anti-rape law, activists say a bill against sexual harassment at the workplace that has been passed by the Lok Sabha but is yet to be brought before the Rajya Sabha is “useless”.

In a discussion at Indian Women Press Corps here, women activists also said they had little hope that government will make the laws stronger in real terms. “We do not accept the present draft bill. It has a lot missing,” Indu Agnihotri, director, Centre for Women and Development Studies said. The activists said among the shortcomings of the bill, the main was making the sexual assault gender-neutral.

The government has formed a committee under former Supreme Court chief justice J S Verma to collect suggestions on need to change the rape related laws. The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Bill was passed by Lok Sabha in 2012 but is pending with Rajya Sabha. IANS

BANGALORE: Last year was bad for Karnataka. This year could be worse if nature does not turn benevolent. After a failed monsoon, winter has been elusive and there is warning of a dire scarcity of water in the days to come, even for capital Bangalore.

The poor monsoon has left three-fourths of the state reeling under drought and most of the reservoirs half empty.

The storage in the two reser-voirs, Krishnaraja Sagar (KRS) and Kabini, which are the major water source for Bangalore, has reached alarmingly low levels, prompting the BJP government to talk of the need to ration water for the capital’s over eight mil-lion population. KRS reservoir in Mandya district is about 130km from Bangalore and Kabini in Mysore district.

However, with assembly elec-tions due in May, the government retracted on possibility of water rationing but has appealed to Bangaloreans to judiciously use the resource to ensure that the supply lasts till the monsoon sea-son begins in June.

Water Resources Minister Basavaraj Bommai had created a scare among Bangaloreans, and also given a big stick to the

opposition to beat his govern-ment, by stating earlier this week that water needed to be rationed for the city and a decision would be announced soon.

Such a decision would have been disastrous for the ruling BJP, par-ticularly in Bangalore as the city continues to reel under the garbage mess that started last July. The BJP had won 17 of the 28 assem-bly seats from Bangalore in the last polls in May 2008, when it came to power for the first time in the state. The assembly has 225 seats, including one nominated member.

Two years later the party also captured power in the Bangalore civic body, the BBMP (Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike or Greater Bangalore City Corporation). Realising that the political cost could be too heavy if water rationing is implemented, Bommai and Law Minister S. Suresh Kumar, who also handles the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board, have sought to douse panic spreading among Bangaloreans over water shortage.

At the same time, both stressed that water availability for the city till next monsoon was at the bare minimum and wise usage was essential. The figures Bommai reeled off over the water levels

at KRS and Kabini painted a grim picture. Together, the two reser-voirs have just about 18 tmcft (thousand million cubic feet). Of this, live storage — or the water that can be drawn — is 10 tmcft.

Bangalore alone needs 7.5 tmcft of water till May at 1.5 tmcft every month. That leaves only 2.5 tmcft to meet the needs of people in Mysore, Mandya and Ramanagaram districts till May. Ramanagaram and Mandya are 40km and 80km away from Bangalore on way to Mysore, which is about 130km from here.

Bommai said this quantum of water would be sufficient to meet the needs of these three districts.

Since the situation is grim, the government has set up a panel headed by water resources department secretary to daily monitor Bangalore’s water needs. While the water scarcity is alarming, the winter too has eluded Bangaloreans. But for a few days in early November and December, there has been no need for woollens as the temperature has been above average.

It has been bad in Bangalore as day temperature has been three to five degrees above the average of around 25 degrees Celsius for this time of the year. IANS

Bangalore faces water scarcity with depleting reservoirsHYDERABAD: India has denied

award-winning British journal-ist Yvonne Ridley a visa. She was scheduled to address the Spring of Islam conference being held here by the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind.

The London-based journalist was to address various sessions at the three-day conference, which began on Friday. “The Indian gov-ernment is refusing to give me a conference visa to address 50,000 women in Hyderabad about wom-en’s rights ... I would have thought after the catastrophic handling of the Dehli rape case, politicians would be more sensitive, but it seems not. We women continue to be sidelined and treated as second class citizens,” she said in her post on Facebook.

Ridley, through video confer-ence, addressed three sessions of girls, women and journalists. “The Indian government knows how powerful words are. That is why I am sitting in the UK today talking to you instead of being with you to deliver this speech in person,” she said, addressing the session of journalists yesterday.

Khalid Mubashir-ul-Zafar, presi-dent of Jamaat-e-Islami’s Hyderabad unit, said Ridely was given all nec-essary clearances by the external affairs ministry, but was denied visa in the last minute because of the tense situation in Hyderabad.

IANS

Visa denied to British scribe

President greets nation on Lohri and PongalNEW DELHI: President Pranab Mukherjee yester-day greeted the nation on Lohri, Makar Sankranti and Pongal, expressing hope that the festivals would bring prosperity and happiness. In his message to the nation, the President said: “On the auspicious occasion of Lohri, Makar Sankranti and Pongal, I extend my warm greetings and good wishes to all fellow citizens and wish them every happiness and prosperity. May these festivals which celebrate fresh harvests, the hard work of our farmers and the bounty of nature bring the promise of further growth and progress for our nation.” Lohri would be celebrated today, while Pongal and Makar Sankranti would fall tomorrow.

Railway body fines 2,040 for spittingBHUBANESWAR: The East Coast Railway has fined 2,040 people for spitting and littering at railway premises in less than a month and collected Rs128,570 in fines from them, an official said. The people faced action for their acts in different railway premises under the jurisdic-tion of ECoR. The railways have been imposing different amounts of fine on people to maintain cleanliness in its premises, including in differ-ent railway stations since the past few months. Those spit-ting and littering at A1 cat-egory major railway stations like Bhubaneswar, Puri and Visakhapatnam were fined Rs100 each, while at smaller stations, the fines range from Rs50 to Rs30.

Man threatening Pooja Bhatt heldMUMBAI: An unidentified man who was making threat-ening calls to Pooja Bhatt has been arrested, says the actor-filmmaker. “Just got a call from Abhay Shastry, Bandra Police Station, confirming they have arrested man who made abu-sive/threatening calls to me on January 9,” Pooja tweeted yesterday. “Police confirms that man who abused/threat-ened me is all of 25 years old and works for Vodafone. Can’t wait to look into his eyes and say hello,” she further posted. Pooja had filed an official com-plaint on Wednesday at the police station here against the caller, who was calling her incessantly in the wee hours, and threatened her.

IANS

BRIEFLY

15INDIA SUNDAY 13 JANUARY 2013


THE NR EYEMoiz Mannan

NEW DELHI: In a veiled warn-ing, the IAF chief said yesterday that India may have to “look at some other options” if Pakistan continues to violate the ceasefire on the LoC with impunity even as the government said it will not buckle to “wild calls for revenge and reaction” over the killing and beheading of two Indian sol-diers by Pakistani troops.

Air Chief Marshal N A K Browne termed violations of the Line of Control (LoC) and the 2003 ceasefire agreement by Pakistan as “totally unacceptable”.

“We are watching the situa-tion carefully, if the violations continue, perhaps we may have to think of some other options for compliance,” he said, but declined to elaborate on the options.

“Options are options...If

violations continue we might have to look at the whole issue again.”

The Indian Air Force (IAF) chief ’s strong words came a day after Pakistan summoned the Indian envoy in Islamabad to lodge its protest over the killing of a Pakistani soldier in alleged fir-ing by Indian troops on Thursday.

External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid, in an interview to NDTV news channel, however said the government was not “going to be pressurised by wild calls for revenge and reaction”.

“We will do what is in the best interest of the country and peace, keeping in mind that there is a lot at stake.” Heightened border tensions “demands very respon-sible and sensible and moderate behaviour”, he said.

Union Minister of State for

Information and Broadcasting Manish Tewari said the Jan 8 kill-ing and mutilation of two Indian soldiers was in violation of “rules of engagement”.

“Government is doing eve-rything at the strategic level to express its anger. We have said clearly that the incident is inhu-man. The incident is in complete violation of the Geneva conven-tion and rules of engagement,” he said at a press conference.

Pakistan has not responded so far to India’s request for a brig-adier-level flag meeting. “We are still waiting (for a response),” the Indian Army spokesperson said.

There was no firing yesterday on the Line of Control that divides Jammu and Kashmir between India and Pakistan, he informed. The army also clarified that of the

two killed Indian soldiers, one was “mutilated and beheaded” while the other was “mutilated”.

Border tensions between India and Pakistan have risen sharply since the January 6 death of a Pakistani soldier in alleged firing by Indian forces along the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir.

Two days later, Pakistani sol-diers killed and beheaded two Indian soldiers in the Mendhar sector in Poonch district. India had summoned the Pakistani High Commissioner Salman Bashir to lodge its protest over the killing. Political parties have called for tough action against Pakistan.

Former BJP president Rajnath Singh said India should recall its high commissioner to Pakistan and scale down the level of dip-lomatic ties. He said that recent

incident on the LoC in Poonch district of Jammu and Kashmir indicates that Pakistan was not keen to improve relations.

Congress leader Ambika Soni said the brutal killing of two Indian soldiers was a hindrance to the confidence building meas-ures between India and Pakistan.

In Poonch district, the civil society appealed to the govern-ments of India and Pakistan to restore peace and respect the 2003 ceasefire agreement.

In a written appeal, prominent citizens of the town said: “For the people of Poonch region as others living close to the LoC, the cease-fire (agreement of November 2003) brought peace, security and created atmosphere for develop-ment in the border areas.”

IANS

LoC killings: IAF chief talks toughGovernment will not listen to ‘wild calls for revenge and reaction’, says Khurshid

RANCHI: The Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) yester-day sought more time for form-ing an alternative government in the state.

JMM chief Shibu Soren, his son Hemant Soren and other leaders made the request when they met Governor Syed Ahmad here.

“We had requested the gover-nor to give us some more time for formation of the government in the state,” Hemant Soren told reporters afterwards. “The possi-bilities of alternative government exist in the state and the governor should explore the possibilities.”

Hemant Soren returned here on Friday night after meeting Congress leaders in Delhi. He said that the Congress would decide about the formation of an alterna-tive government.

The 28-month Bharatiya Janata Party-led Arjun Munda govern-ment fell after JMM withdrew support Jan 8. The Munda cabi-net had recommended dissolution of the state assembly. Congress and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) delegations also separately met the governor and requested not to accept the cabinet’s decision to dissolve the assembly.

“We requested the governor to consider it if JMM stakes claim to form the government. We will inform him (governor) after talk-ing to central leaders. We do not

want president’s rule in the state,” Congress legislative party leader Rajendra Singh said. RJD legisla-tive party leader Annapurna Devi also met the governor and requested him not to dissolve the house. “We requested him to explore possibilities of formation of the government in the state,” she said.

JMM has been exploring the possibility of forming a govern-ment in the state with Congress backing. Congress legislators and leaders in the state are in favour of the formation of the alterna-tive government, but are yet to get any concrete assurance from the Congress high command, say party sources.

Congress, RJD and some Independent legislators could support an alternative govern-ment led by the JMM.

If such an agreement were to be arrived at, the Congress, RJD and Independents, along with the JMM could attempt a coalition comprising 41 legislators.

Of the 82 legislators in the state, 37 are in favour of fresh polls. The 37 include 18 of the BJP, six of All Jharkhand Students’ Union (AJSU), two of Janata Dal-United (JD-U) and 11 of the Jharkhand Vikas Morch-P (JVM-P).

The AJSU chief also met the governor and requested to dis-solve the house as recommended by the cabinet. IANS

JMM seeks time to form new govt

IT TOOK more than a dec-ade for Kerala to realize that India’s annual diaspora jam-boree is no place to get the

peculiar issues of non-resident Keralites resolved; not even a spe-cial session dedicated to its mas-sive workforce in the Gulf.

The state has hosted NRI conclaves with different pur-poses earlier, but this time Chief Minister Oommen Chandy has done the right thing by announc-ing an all-encompassing Pravasi Bharatiya Divas exclusively for its own overseas workers.

The 11th edition of the Pravasi Bharatiya divas, hosted by Kerala for the first time, con-cluded yesterday with nearly the same hyperbole and rhetoric as in previous years. It has become clear not that the event rolls out the red carpet only for the high and mighty NRIs to lure their money. Celebrated to mark the return from South Africa of the ‘Father of the Nation’, the high profile festival has nothing to do

with Gandhian thought.One fails to understand, why

do the Government of India as well as the Ministry of Overseas Indians Affairs not come out straight and call it an invest-ment meet. Then, they would be able to go about their desired business without feeling guilty about it.

The President, the Prime Minister, the Overseas Indians Affairs Minister and an array of top functionaries make it a point to refer to the plight of the blue collar workers in the Gulf and to assure that India would take care of them.

A re-iteration of their plight from this platform without ever addressing the core issues amounts to cruelty. Why should it be a platform for the over-seas workers to come and nar-rate their woes? Does India not already have the mechanism in place to know their problems as and when they crop up? What poor NRIs expect at the PBD is

helping hands and not a shoul-der to cry on.

So, it’s good that Chandy has announced his state’s plans to hold a PBD in Kerala every year immediately following the national event. Further, to moni-tor the implementation of the announced welfare and security measures, the chief minister has envisaged the formation of a per-manent Global Advisory Council. One hopes that his council would be given some statutory powers to hold the concerned accountable for inaction, if any.

According to reports from Kochi, the council would be responsible for monitoring issues pertaining to amnesty return-ees, those still in jail after serving their term, financial assistance for those undergoing punishment in vehicle accidents who are unable

to give compensation, providing legal assistance to those in need of it and facilitate registration of Adhaar.

The Global Advisory Committee for Kerala would monitor the decisions taken at the Pravasi Bharatiya Diwas and would take initiative for implementing welfare and rehabilitation pro-grammes for the expatriates. The chief minister was further quoted as saying that the Global Advisory Committee for Kerala would also be entrusted with efforts to real-ize the Air Kerala project, to set up Malayalee expatriate rehabili-tation projects and to deal with issues of non-resident Keralites in countries other than those in the Gulf.

The Kerala government also plans to set up a help desk to ensure the welfare of aged par-ents of NRIs. “Those working in West Asia can register a com-plaint over the phone. The gov-ernment will ensure the safety of family members and will protect

their personal property,” the chief minister said at the PBD session.

The greatest amount of dis-satisfaction was understandably expressed by Gulf NRIs regarding the functioning of Air India. They were also deeply concerned about the bulk loss of jobs owing to nationalisation initiatives in the Gulf. For this purpose there has been a vociferous demand for a comprehensive resettlement and rehabilitation package for return-ees. In addition, the participants wanted free travel tickets for the oustees.

Another major issue raised by the NRIs was the limit imposed on gold NRIs can bring when they visit the country. They were told that MOIA had taken up the issue with the finance ministry and a revision in the limit could be expected in the next budget.

The delegates were also informed that the Government of India was “actively consid-ering” a proposal to extend the period of the Non-resident

Indian (NRI) status of returnees from the present one year. Many wanted effective intervention of the Government of India in get-ting released hundreds of Indians languishing in various jails abroad for no fault of theirs. They sug-gested a free legal aid facility in all embassies to help such people. The shortage of staff at embassies in the Gulf and the attitude of the existing staff also came under fire from the participants.

The high cost of remittance is pinching for the low income work-ers in the gulf and MOIA offi-cials have said the issue required a “detailed technical and expert study”.

The NRIs also expressed con-cern over lack of facilities for higher education for their chil-dren and kin and new regulations in most Gulf countries affecting the self-employed sections. There were also suggestions regarding setting up of NRI hospitals and NRI employment exchanges.

THE PENINSULA

Kerala aims to make its ‘own’ PBD more useful

GANDHINAGAR: Fresh off his re-election as chief minister of Gujarat and amid expecta-tions he could contend to be the next prime minister, Narendra Modi avoided talk of a bigger political future during a state investment event.

Still, Modi, one of India’s most popular and divisive politicians, was the star of his “Vibrant Gujarat Summit,” which featured a parade of corporate heavyweights as well as foreign officials who extolled the business-friendly state and Modi’s leadership even as they mostly kept clear of politics.

“In Gujarat, we see a culture of implementation, reflecting the qualities of the chief minister,” Cyrus Mistry, who recently suc-ceeded Ratan Tata as head of the Tata Group, India’s biggest busi-ness house, said from a stage he shared with Modi.

In one of Modi’s biggest wins, in 2008 he convinced Tata Motors to build a factory in the state for

its low-cost Nano after its plans to make the car in West Bengal were disrupted by farmers.

Last month, Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party won 115 of the state assem-bly’s 182 seats against 61 for the Congress party, which heads a national government that has been beset by corruption scandals and presided over an economy on track this fiscal year for its slow-est growth in a decade.

Modi appeared to downplay ambitions for higher office, mak-ing a point of inviting delegates to the next edition of the event in 2015. “When I gave a similar invitation in 2011, the media had mocked me saying I was yet to be re-elected and was already issuing invitations. This time, there is no such problem,” he said in his clos-ing remarks, delivered in Hindi.

Gujarat, with a long tradition of entrepreneurship, has been a magnet for industrial investment thanks in part to what is widely

regarded as efficient state govern-ment, which stands in contrast to the red tape and unpredictability elsewhere in India that frustrate businesses and investors.

One of the few major execu-tives in attendance to speak openly of Modi as candidate for prime minister was Sanjay Lalbhai, chairman of Arvind Ltd, a textile maker based in nearby Ahmedabad. “We are dealing with him as the chief minister of Gujarat as of now, but I am sure he has the skills required at the national level also, the decisive-ness, the leadership,” he said.

Others lauding Modi included the billionaire Ambani brothers. “Gujarat has been the birthplace of India’s greatest leaders. What all these men have said about leader-ship, Narendrabhai has practised in his 10-year tenure as chief min-ister,” Anil Ambani said, stopping short of expressing support for Modi as a potential prime minister, which he did in 2009. REUTERS

Pune’s German Bakery opens doorsPUNE: Pune’s landmark German Bakery, which was targeted in a terrorist attack in 2010, has virtually risen like a phoenix 35 months after it was completely devastated. An excited Snehal Kharose, the daughter of the founder, said that it was thrown open on Thursday (January 10) with a soft launch, “just to inform the people and our patrons that we are still here”.

IANS

Modi avoids talk of higher officeGujarat state Chief Minister Narendra Modi addressing the audience during the valedictory function of the Vibrant Gujarat 2013 6th Global Summit at Mahatma Mandir in Gandhinagar, 30km from Ahmedabad, yesterday.

MORNING BREAK16SUNDAY 13 JANUARY 2013


Fajr (Dawn) 5:01

Shorook (Sunrise) 6:21

Zuhr (Noon) 11:42

Asr (Afternoon) 2:43

Maghrib (Sunset) 5:05

Isha (Night) 6:35

PRAYER TIME

Weather Conditions:

Slight dust to dusty with partly cloudy to cloudy and chance of light rain by night, relatively cold.

High: 19° Low: 13°

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Mostly sunnyMostly sunny Mostly sunny

Today Monday Tuesday

SUNRISE | SUNSET

06:21 17:05 06:15 & 17:45 13:15 & 23:30 20-30/35KT

HIGH | LOW WIND

SUN TIDE SEA

TODAY TOMORROW

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DOHA - SUN & SEA

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MUSCAT 24/18 Clear 25/18 Mostly sunny

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KUWAIT 14/08 Mostly sunny 15/09 Mostly sunny

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The capsized cruise liner Costa Concordia is pictured outside Giglio Harbour yesterday.

GIGLIO ISLAND, Italy: Shaken survivors and grieving relatives of the 32 victims of the Costa Concordia cruise ship disaster began arriving on the island of Giglio for a first anni-versary commemoration of the tragedy today.

“It’s terrible coming back here,” one survivor, Clara Stara, said in the tiny Italian port where the giant hulk of a ship, twice as big as the Titanic, still lies keeled over on its side.

“I’ve been anxious since yester-day and I hadn’t felt any fear for a whole year,” she said.

Among the arrivals was the family of Erika Fani Soria Molina, a Peruvian waitress who died.

“This is very difficult for us,” said her sister Maddelein Soria, 35, as her father held back tears.

“This is something that will

stay with us our whole lives. I am here to pay tribute to my sister. I feel as if I am with her again,” she said.

Indian-born Kevin Rebello, whose brother worked as a waiter on the ship and is still officially reported missing, said: “It’s not easy to return. I have still not found peace.”

The 290m liner crashed into a group of rocks just off Giglio, veered sharply and keeled over just as many passengers were sit-ting down for supper on the first night of a Mediterranean cruise.

There were 4,229 people from 70 countries on board.

Hundreds were forced to jump into the freezing waters after some of the lifeboats failed to deploy, while others climbed down a rope ladder across the hull in the dark to waiting boats.

Salvage workers have been labouring around the clock for months to stabilise the wreck and eventually refloat it and tow it away in an operation that has never been attempted before.

The removal has been hit by delays but the head of Italy’s civil protection agency, Franco Gabrielli, said it would happen by September at the latest.

Franco Porcellacchia, an exec-utive from ship owner Costa Crociere who is overseeing the project, said the budget had increased from $300m to $400m and could rise further. Mayor Sergio Ortelli said islanders were keen to welcome back those who lived through that night, even though Costa Crociere asked sur-vivors to stay away from the com-memoration because of logistics.

Many survivors sought shelter

in local homes and a church in the port after being pulled shivering from the sea following a panicky evacuation.

“The idea is to exorcise a hor-rible episode, and to share the pain and drama of those who lost a loved one,” Ortelli said.

“Many survivors and relatives of victims have returned to thank us, and share their memories with us. Some, a year on, still send us emails,” he said. The commemora-tions today will include replacing where it once stood the rock that the ship crashed into and tore away.

Father Lorenzo Pasquotti said he would display objects that sur-vivors left behind — life jackets, emergency blankets, even dis-carded rolls of bread — next to the altar, underneath a Madonna statue salvaged from the ship’s chapel. AFP

Shaken survivors remember cruise disaster

ROME: A 13-year-old boy ran away from his adoptive par-ents in Italy, taking his father’s Mercedes and driving 1,000km toward his native Poland before being stopped in Germany.

The boy — a go-kart enthusi-ast — managed to pass motor-way toll booths and cross two international borders in his two-day drive across northern Italy, Austria and half of Germany.

“He looks like a 16-year-old, but still! He managed to fuel up and pass two borders. It’s just

incredible,” Eleonora Spadati, head of local Carabinieri police in Montebelluna in northeast Italy where the boy ran from, said yesterday.

Spadati said the boy missed Poland and wanted to see his biological sister.

Just before leaving on Thursday with just ¤200 (around $270) in his pocket and a pass-port, he had also argued with his parents after they confiscated his mobile phone as a punishment for topping up its credit without

their consent. The boy’s parents quickly realised their son might have tried to go to Poland and contacted local Italian police, asking for an alert along his pos-sible route.

German traffic police picked him up just 200 kilometres from the Polish border on Friday.

Spadati said she had been con-tacted by the Polish consulate asking after the boy, and social workers will increase checks on the family once they return to Italy today. AFP

Boy, 13, drives father’s Mercedes across Europe

LONDON : Astronomers have discovered the larg-est known structure in the universe — a group of quasars so large it would take 4 billion years to cross it while travelling at speed of light.

The immense scale also challenges Albert Einstein’s Cosmological Principle, the assumption that the universe looks the same from every point of view, researchers said.

The findings by aca-demics from Britain’s University of Central Lancashire were published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and reported on the society’s website on Friday.

Quasars are believed to be the brightest objects in the universe, with light emanating from the nuclei of galaxies from the early days of the universe and visible billions of light-years away.

“Since 1982 it has been known that quasars tend to group together in clumps or ‘structures’ of surpris-ingly large sizes, forming large quasar groups or LQGs,” the society said.

REUTERS

Astronomers find largest structure in the universe

Non-oil sector drives GCC GDP growth

Sunday 13 January 20131 Rabial I 1434

Volume 17Number 5578

Price: QR2

[email protected] | [email protected] Editorial: 44557741 | Advertising: 44557837 / 44557780www.thepeninsulaqatar.com

Business | 18

Lifestyle trade fair

Souvenir vendor Soenke Preuss displays a miniature model of the ocean liner Titanic during the lifestyle trade fair ‘early bird’ in Hamburg, yesterday. A total of 944 companies are displaying their lifestyle products on home living, presents, fashion, jewellery and wellness on some 80,000 square metre space.

DOHA: QFIB, Qatar’s first independent Shariah compli-ant investment bank authorised by the Qatar Financial Centre Regulatory Authority (QFCRA), and Saudi Printing & Packaging Company (SPPC) announced the successful completion of the Emirates National Factory of Plastic Industries (ENPI Group) deal, a statement said yesterday.

QFIB’s 71.3 percent stake, a majority share in ENPI, was sold to SPPC, a publicly traded Saudi firm specialised in provid-ing printing packaging solutions. ENPI Group is the leading pro-ducer of flexible and rigid plastic packaging solutions having strong manufacturing base including eight factories in Sharjah, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh.

The acquisition was announced at a closing ceremony held at Saudi Research and Marketing Group’s headquarters in Riyadh.

The ceremony was attended by H R H Prince Faisal bin Salman bin Abdulaziz and a number of

high ranking officials from KSA, Qatar and UAE.

QFIB acquired the major-ity stake in ENPI Group in July 2009 and since then has played an instrumental role in cementing ENPI’s position as a leading player in the plastic packaging solutions industry by streamlining the busi-ness, institutionalising operations and expanding ENPI’s manufac-turing base to include Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia.

QFIB chairman, Abdulla bin Fahad Al Marri said: “QFIB’ busi-ness strategy focuses on investing in companies that demonstrate positive growth potential. ENPI had such capabilities. During our holding period, ENPI managed to successfully grow and expand where its revenue has more than doubled since our acquisition. We are pleased with the successful exit of ENPI which has generated for the Bank an IRR of 31 percent.

Emad Mansour, CEO of QFIB added: “ENPI represents the typi-cal size and sector that we target

in our investment strategy. From the outset we worked closely with ENPI’s management team to effectively implement strategic growth plans and streamline the company’s operations.

“Our successful exit of ENPI is a testament to our ability to grow our portfolio companies, in spite of difficult market conditions, while generating sound returns for our investors.

“We would like to thank Nizar Rajoub, ENPI’s Founder and CEO, for his unwavering commitment to growing the business and estab-lishing ENPI as a regional player in the plastic conversion manufac-turing sector.”

Nizar Rajoub, Founder and CEO of ENPI also added: “We thank QFIB for their valuable expertise and insight during this important phase of ENPI group’s business cycle. QFIB shared our vision and strongly believed in the company’s growth potential. QFIB played a critical role in helping ENPI build the foundations for

the next phase of our growth. We are looking forward to working with SPPC to further cement the position of ENPI Group as a lead-ing provider of plastic packaging solutions

Saad Al Azwari, Board Member and CEO of SPPC said: “It was a

pleasure to work with QFIB on the structuring of this transaction. The QFIB team demonstrated professionalism and commit-ment throughout the negotiation process.”

As part of the deal QFIB will retain FutureCard and

TechnoCard, which form the technology businesses of ENPI. FutureCard is the leading manu-facturer of smart cards having strong expertise in designing, manufacturing and customisation of all types of cards.

THE PENINSULA

QFIB, SPPC successfully close ENPI deal

High ranking officials from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE at the ceremony to close the ENPI deal.

DOHA: The Middle East and North African (MENA) coun-tries are expected to pump nearly $250bn into power projects over the next five years to expand generation capacity and meet the growing domestic demand.

The projects will be one of the main topics of discussion at the 11th Power-Gen Middle East conference which will be held in Doha from February 4-6. Key offi-cials and experts from the Gulf and other countries will attend the annual event. The event will explore new venture investments, intellectual property, enhanced technology solutions, management skills and innovative new products.

Significant energy-related projects as part of the 200 planned and announced ventures val-ued between $100m and $20bn will be major points of discus-sion at the event. Citing find-ings of a latest study conducted by Arab Petroleum Investment Corp (Apicorp), the organisers said in Dubai yesterday that six countries, which control 40 per-cent of the world’s recoverable oil resources, will add nearly half the expected additional power genera-tion capacity in the region.

It estimated the total capital in power generation in Mena at $147.5bn during 2013-2017 to add about 123.9GW of electricity while the rest could cover water projects. The study puts investments in power projects at around $63.1bn in the GCC, $36.8bn in Mashreq (east) Arab nations, $21.4bn in Iran, $14.6bn in Maghreb Arab countries and nearly $2.3bn in other Arab nations.

More than 60 distinguished del-egates from over 20 countries will speak about a variety of issues, including the challenges and opportunities for power project development, maximising today’s grid potential and tomorrow’s alternatives, renewable energy technologies and integration and operation and maintenance.

Delegates and visitors will also have the opportunity to view first-hand innovative and cutting-edge products and technologies by over 135 leading regional and interna-tional companies.

THE PENINSULA

Mena to pump $250bn into power projects in five years

DOHA: Global gas-to-liquid (GTL) leaders from the US to Japan are here in GTL’s Capital to initiate a new course of direc-tion for the promising industry at the inaugural World GTL Congress, which will get under way today at the St Regis Hotel.

Being held under the patron-age of the Minister of Energy and Industry and Chairman and Managing Director of Qatar Petroleum (QP) H E Dr Mohammed bin Saleh Al Sada, the congress promises to be a premium platform to spawn fresh dialogue with a rich conference agenda, side events and an excit-ing exhibition over the next three days.

Organised by IQPC (the International Quality and Productivity Centre), with QP hosting the world’s largest such assembly to date, the congress is stealing the industry spotlight at a time when GTL is fast cement-ing its position as a revolutionary

novel technology with potential to power such wide-ranging indus-tries as aviation, vehicle engine manufacturing, fuel companies, lubricant manufacturing and pet-rochemical plants.

“The first-ever World GTL Congress has attracted the atten-tion of many top figures of the oil and gas world to discuss the future of the industry. The diverse variety of sessions will give a com-plete overview of GTL, technolo-gies, innovations, and market, in context with a view towards the future,” said Leila Masinaei Al Marzouqi, Divisional Director, Oil and Gas from IQPC Middle East.

During the event, more than 500 attendees from 30 countries, representing a broad sweep of industries from education and research to national oil compa-nies, will utilise the opportunities on the sidelines of the confer-ence and break out workshop sessions to network, exchange ideas, gain knowledge and foster

a formidable new circle of business partnerships.

“We find it apt that an event of this scale for the global GTL industry is taking place in the ‘GTL Capital of the World’, and we look forward to continue con-tributing to Qatar’s leadership role in GTL,” added Al Marzouqi.

After the official opening cer-emony, scheduled for 9am, by an opening address and keynote by Hamad Rashid Al Mohannadi, Managing Director, RasGas Company Limited, followed by more insightful keynotes by Akbar Al Baker, CEO, Qatar Airways; Wael Sawan, Managing Director and Chairman, Qatar Shell; and Saad Al Kuwari, CEO, Qatar International Petroleum Marketing Company (Tasweeq).

Today’s conference agenda focuses on the present and future state of the GTL industry, as well as GTL financing and GTL plants operations technology.

THE PENINSULA

DOHA: Investors on the Qatari bourse have become richer by over a huge QR21bn ($5.75bn) in barely seven trading days since the dawn of the current year, thanks to stocks rallying ahead of full-year profit and divi-dend declaration by the listed entities.

The market capitalisation of the bourse (Qatar Exchange) was QR459.88bn at the close of trading on December 31, the last trading day of 2012, which surged to QR480.88bn last Thursday, up 4.6 percent.

The capitalisation figure has been jumping by QR3bn on aver-age each trading day since the market reopened after New Year on January 2. There have been seven trading days since.

“We expect the rally to con-tinue,” an investor said. The equity market normally witnesses a bullish run at the start of a new year, anticipating robust profit and dividend declaration by the companies.

The main index of the bourse gained five percent, or about 423 points, since the beginning of the year, from 8,359 as on December 31, 2012 to 8,782 on January 2 when the market closed after last week’s trading. The year 2012 was bad for the bourse as stocks plum-meted amid subdued trading with all indicators reflecting a decline except the market capitalisation figure that surged at the year-end, albeit by a marginal QR2.53bn.

More than 10 times that yearly gain was witnessed in just seven days of trading this year.

“One of the factors that have had a positive impact on the world stock market, as also on Qatari shares, was the end now being in sight of Washington’s fiscal woes,” said another investor.

Nearly all counters have shown improvement since the dawn of 2013 except insurance, with a majority of the 42 listed entities

ending higher in daily trading. As for trading through last week, 29 stocks ended higher at the end of trading on Thursday, for instance.

Investors said liquidity flow into the bourse was a problem last year and added they hoped the situation would change this year as stocks were expected to remain generally buoyant.

As for net profits as well, 2012 wasn’t an eventful year as collec-tive profits of the listed entities for the first three quarters were only marginally more than those in the same period of 2011.

The net profits of the compa-nies in the first nine months of 2011 totalled a little more than QR28bn ($7.67bn) — a figure that showed only a slight increase (QR28.52bn) in the first three quarters of 2012.

So unless the companies per-form exceptionally well in the fourth and the last quarter of 2012 (which is unlikely), their collective net profits are not expected to show considerable increase over the previous year, analysts said.

THE PENINSULA

GTL experts gather in Doha for first industry congress

Investors get richer by over QR21bnQE bull run expected to continue

Last year was bad for the bourse with all indicators reflecting a decline except the market capitalisation figure that surged by a marginal QR2.53bn. More than 10 times that yearly gain was witnessed in just seven days of trading this year.

18 BUSINESSSUNDAY 13 JANUARY 2013


ATHENS: Greece’s parliament early yesterday approved a new tax bill, part of the latest batch of fiscal reforms tied to the country’s next slice of EU loans.

The legislation, criticised by the opposition as another serious blow to middle-class incomes in the midst of a recession, was sup-ported by 162 deputies from the governing three-party coalition in a vote held after midnight in the 300-strong parliament.

The latest reform, the first part of a larger overhaul expected in April, broadens the tax base in the hope of increasing state revenue by about ¤2.5bn ($3.3bn) this year.

It introduces new annual income thresholds for salaried tax-payers and scraps tax breaks for the self-employed, a class blamed for a large part of the tax evasion that has plagued state finances for decades. The conservative-led coalition government has been hit with several defections in the past few weeks in opposition to the con-tinued austerity wave.

Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras had said the bill had to be voted on this week ahead of a meeting by European finance ministers that will determine the disbursement of Greece’s next loan instalment. AFP

Greece okays new tax bill on rescue terms

DOHA: Real GDP growth in the GCC is likely to have slowed from 7.8 percent in 2011 to an estimated 5.7 percent in 2012, according to a report by QNB Group.

This remains a relatively high rate of growth compared with many other countries in the current chal-lenging global economic and financial environment. The non-oil sector has driven growth while oil output has also risen.

In 2012, oil prices remained at historically high levels, boosting government revenue and spending, which, in turn, boosts growth across non-oil industrial and services sec-tors. Around 22 percent of govern-ment spending is capital expenditure, mainly on infrastructure in trans-port, real estate, education and healthcare sectors. Government spending, therefore, supports non-oil sectors such as construction and utilities.

The remaining 78 percent of gov-ernment spending is current expend-iture, mainly on government wages and other public services. This pro-vides an injection of income into the GCC non-oil economy, driving growth in services and retail trade.

Additionally, non-oil industry has grown strongly as investment in major manufacturing projects, par-ticularly petrochemicals, has boosted output.

Rising oil production was also an important factor driving growth in 2012. Total GCC oil production reached 17.2 million barrels per day (bpd), on average, in the first three quarters of 2012, 6.2 percent higher than in 2011.

Higher oil production came as Opec removed its production quotas for individual countries.

The quotas had initially been put in place in 2009 when oil prices crashed, but were replaced in 2012 with a more relaxed aggregate production target for all Opec members. Opec also ramped up production in 2011-12 to calm oil markets as concerns grew about lower output in countries such as Libya (due to the Arab Spring) and Iran (due to sanctions).

Overall, despite historically high oil prices and rising oil production, strong growth in the non-oil GCC economy has sustained its share in total GDP at around 50 percent in 2012. QNB Group estimates that total nominal GDP in the GCC was $1.56 trillion in 2012, or 2.2 percent of global GDP.

Saudi Arabia is the largest GCC economy, accounting for around 47 percent of the region’s GDP.

The oil sector has underpinned the Saudi economy with production averaging 9.8 million bpd in the first three quarters of 2012, up from an average of 9.3 million in 2011. Real growth was even stronger in the Saudi non-oil sector in 2012 at 7.2 percent. Ongoing major investment projects have supported growth in sectors such as construction, which expanded by 10.3 percent in 2012.

Qatar is the third largest economy in the GCC, accounting for 12 per-cent of regional GDP. There has been a slowdown in real GDP growth as the state’s rapid liquefied natural gas expansion programme has peaked and further expansion has been put on hold, for the time being.

However, growth is still strong at 6.1 percent in 2012 due to the non-oil sector.

The non-oil industrial and services sectors are estimated to have exhib-ited strong growth of 10.1 percent and 9.1 percent respectively, accord-ing to QNB Group. This compares to just 2.1 percent for the oil and gas sector.

Although oil production is levelling off, non-oil sectors are likely to grow strongly in most countries, supported by rising government expenditure. Budget spending continues to rise across the GCC on the back of strong inflows of hydrocarbons revenue.

For instance, the Saudi budget for 2013 includes an increase in planned spending of 19 percent to $219bn.

In Qatar, major infrastructure projects are beginning to be ramped up to ensure they are completed within a set timeframe to meet FIFA requirements for the 2022 World Cup. Project spending of around $30bn a year is expected in 2013-14 in Qatar.

Although spending is being con-solidated in the UAE, private sector investment is likely to compensate as the recovery takes hold. Some new real estate projects are being initi-ated and old projects revamped.

Strong investment into non-oil industries across the GCC, includ-ing production of petrochemicals, fertilisers, steel and aluminium will continue to support non-oil growth.

Therefore, QNB Group expects GDP growth in the GCC growth to stabilise at around 5 percent-6 per-cent in 2013-14.

THE PENINSULA

DOHA: Qtel customers can now request business prod-ucts and services through Almana Networks, thanks to a new partnership between the two companies.

This partnership enables Qtel to reach more business customers and to ensure that they receive more convenient and enhanced services.

Customers can also receive greater value thanks to special bundled offers from Almana Networks, one of the country’s leading telecom and IT solu-tion providers. Both companies officially marked the partner-ship at a recent signing cere-mony attended by Mohammed Saleh H Al Marri, Qtel’s Chief Sales and Service Officer, and Almana Networks CEO and Chairman Saud Omar Almana.

Founded in 2005, Almana Networks has become an emerging industry leader in low voltage systems deploy-ment and IT services, which help customers map multiple technology solutions to unique business needs.

Almana Networks helps its customers in developing the

necessary processes and tools to support the rapid implemen-tation of enhanced services.

This partnership is part of Qtel’s commitment to offering its customers more choice and enhanced value on its products and services.

Qtel has been making greater outreach to business custom-ers since July 2012, when the

company launched the “Let’s Talk” campaign.

“Let’s Talk” encourages organisations of all sizes to use Qtel Business Centres across the country to help them upgrade and use new solutions, such as Office in a Box and USB modems for accessing mobile broadband.

THE PENINSULA

Non-oil sector drove GCC GDP growth last year: QNB Group

Qtel offers business products through Almana

Qtel’s Chief Sales and Service Officer Mohammed Saleh H Al Marri and Almana Networks CEO and Chairman Saud Omar Almana at the ceremony to sign the new partnership .

BEIJING: China’s infla-tion rate slowed sharply in 2012, official data showed on Friday, but analysts warned of increasing price risks this year that may limit scope for measures to boost economic growth.

The country’s consumer price index (CPI), a main gauge of inflation, rose 2.6 percent in 2012, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said, down from 5.4 percent the year before.

The annual inflation figure was also lower than the gov-ernment’s target of 4.0 percent, signalling that prices remained well under control last year.

Inflation stood at 2.5 percent year-on-year in December, the NBS said, the second straight month that the reading rose and the highest since May, when it hit three percent.

Rising food prices, par-ticularly for vegetables due to unusually cold weather, were the major contributor to the December increase, according to the bureau.

The benign inflation environ-ment came as China’s economic expansion slowed during the first nine months of the year, with GDP growth of 7.4 percent in the three months to the end

of September — the worst in more than three years.

But data for the final three months of the year, including manufacturing, broader indus-trial output and retail sales, have spurred optimism among economists that growth accel-erated in the fourth quarter.

However, the fact that CPI was surging on food price spikes would limit leeway for policymakers -- who are sensi-tive to the risk of inflation lead-ing to social unrest -- to take further easing measures to spur economic growth, analysts said.

“The central bank is con-cerned about underlining inflationary pressures and it is one reason they have not cut more aggressively,” said Ben Simpfendorfer, managing director of Hong Kong-based economic consultancy firm Silk Road Associates.

“So the biggest risk is this is actually a restraint on policy makers’ ability to support the economy, either through rate cuts or through more stimulus,” he said. Policymakers cut inter-est rates twice last year and trimmed the amount of cash banks must place in reserve three times from December 2011 in a bid to encourage lending and pump up economic

growth. Yao Wei, an economist with Societe Generale in Hong Kong, said that the increase in China’s sub-index of hous-ing inflation to three percent last month from 2.6 percent in November, may increase policy uncertainties.

The reading — a key barom-eter of the country’s property market — covers leasing and decoration costs, but excludes purchase prices, according to the NBS definition.

“The central government may come under pressure to tighten controls on the prop-erty market once the sector shows signs of heating up, which will definitely affect the pace of the overall economic recovery,” she said.

The government has sought to curb property speculation for the past two years, with meas-ures including restrictions on second and third home pur-chases, higher minimum down-payments, and annual taxes in some cities on multiple and non-locally-owned homes.

The moves cooled the once red-hot market, but demand remains pent-up and govern-ment monetary policy has eased in recent months. China releases fourth-quarter GDP figures next Friday. AFP

China’s 2012 inflation rate falls, risks rising Factors exist that limit economic growth: Analysts

SAN FRANCISCO: Personal computer sales slipped at the end of last year, despite the holiday shopping season and the release of new Windows oper-ating software for machines, a leading industry tracker reported on Thursday.

Worldwide PC shipments totalled 89.8 million units in the fourth quarter of 2012, finishing 6.4 percent lower than the same period the prior year, according to International Data Corporation.

It was said to be the first time in more than five years that there was a year-on-year decline in PC shipments during the holiday season.

“Consumers as well as PC ven-dors and distribution channels continued to be diverted from PC sales by ongoing demand for tab-lets and smartphones,” IDC said in a release.

Microsoft released the new Windows 8 operating system worldwide on October 26 as a way to help the dominant PC software maker get a bigger share of the market for mobile devices such as tablets.

Windows 8 was designed with touch-screen capabilities in mind and to make it easier to synchro-nise computer content across the array of Internet-linked gadgets used in modern life. AFP

Personal computer sales slip during holiday season

Auto Show preview

Two cars of the ‘people mover’ public rail are seen covered with an advertisement for the 2014 Chevy Silverado pickup truck as they move past General Motors World Headquarters in Detroit, Michigan yesterday. The North American International Auto Show media preview starts on Monday in Detroit.

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ASHGABAT: Reclusive Turkmenistan will launch a privatisation of state-held assets in its tightly regulated economy in coming months but looks set to keep control of the vital oil and gas industry, offi-cials said yesterday.

“I have just signed an order to approve Turkmenistan’s privati-sation programme for 2013-16,” state media quoted President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov as telling an enlarged govern-ment meeting on Friday.

“Sell-offs of some state com-panies will start already at the beginning of this year,” he said

without giving a time frame. The president, who wields virtually unlimited powers in the Central Asian nation of 5.5 million, made no mention of the oil and gas sector in a country which sits on the world’s fourth-largest natu-ral gas reserves.

A government official said requesting anonymity, that the sector would remain under state control.

The government has compiled a list of other “strategic com-panies of national significance” which will not be privatised, the official said.

He said sell-offs would

primarily target transport, com-munications and construction assets.

“Our privatisation pro-gramme is just in line with our plans of gradual transi-tion to a market economy,” said Berdymukhamedov, whose word is final in a nation seen by human rights bodies as one of the most repressive in the world.

I n h i s s p e e c h , Berdymukhamedov, a qualified dentist widely titled “Arkadag” (The Patron), also did not say whether foreign investors would be allowed to take part in privatisation.

Ruling since the death of his autoctratic predecessor Saparmurat Niyazov in December 2006, Berdymukhamedov has eased his grip on small-scale entrepreneurs and stamped out the black market in the manat currency.

The country now plans to introduce international account-ing standards next year and to launch a stock market in 2016.

But two decades after the Soviet Union’s demise, Turkmenistan is still lagging far behind its oil-rich post-Soviet neighbour Kazakhstan in terms of economic reforms.

Turkmen private businesses have so far been allowed to invest mainly in services, public cater-ing and small-scale construction projects.

The Turkmen economy has grown rapidly on the back of high world oil prices. Berdymukhamedov said gross domestic product had expanded by 11.1 percent last year and would grow by no less than 11 percent in 2013. Growth in 2011 was 14.7 percent.

The International Monetary Fund is slightly less optimistic; in November it forecast growth of 8.0 percent in 2012 and 7.7

percent in 2013. Hopes for future prosperity depend on laying alternative gas export routes to the European Union and India to ease dependence on the country’s former imperial master Russia.

Besides Russia, Turkmenistan sells gas to China and Iran.

The desert nation plans to more than triple its annual gas production capacity to 250 billion cubic metres by 2030.

While state media do not disclose the size of gas output, energy major BP estimated Turkmen gas production at 59.5 bc m in 2011.

REUTERS

NEW YORK: US compa-nies from Avon Products to Yahoo! recruited externally for 29 percent of chief executive officer hires in 2012, the most in at least 17 years as desire for growth sparked demand for new leaders.

Avon’s hiring of Sherilyn McCoy from Johnson & Johnson and Yahoo’s choice of Google’s Marissa Mayer helped fuel a 36 percent jump in outside CEO recruitment at Fortune 500 and Standard & Poor’s 500 companies, according to Crist Kolder Associates. The Hinsdale, Ill.-based search firm analysed management changes at 669 companies through December.

External hiring is rising as companies that may have sought to preserve management conti-nuity through the recession look to shake things up with fresh perspectives and more expan-sion- oriented skill sets, accord-ing to Hugh Shields, co-founder of Chicago-based executive recruiter Shields Meneley Partners.

“During the recession, many of these CEOs were kind of hun-kered down in their positions and quite frankly, boards saw termi-nation of their CEO as additional risk to the organisation,” Shields said in a telephone interview.

“Now as the market has improved, what they’re seeing is the window has opened up” and they’re more willing go outside for talent if necessary.

Total CEO turnover in 2012 cooled to a rate of 9.3 percent, just 0.4 percentage points higher than the 15-year low set in 2010, Crist Kolder data show. Churn among chief financial officers and chief operating officers rose to 13.8 per-cent and 26.5 percent respectively.

Increased volatility in execu-tive roles typically reflects more favorable economic conditions, according to Matt McGreal, chief of the search firm’s corporate gov-ernance practice.

While turnover still trails pre-recession levels, demand for new leaders is rising, said Greg Gabel,

managing director at Canny, Bowen Inc., a New York-based boutique executive search firm.

“People are maybe finally believ-ing the recovery is real,” he said in a phone interview. Companies are “looking at potential acquisi-tions or at least in investing in the businesses in terms of the talent.”

At New York-based Avon, the world’s largest door-to-door cosmetics seller, McCoy was recruited in April after three years of profit declines. She ended the reign of Andrea Jung, who still serves as a senior adviser.

Yahoo!, based in Sunnyvale, California, hired Mayer in July from rival Google to help turn around the company after sales dropped for three years. Mayer, the fifth CEO in four years, took after Scott Thompson resigned over inaccuracies in his academic record.

Many corporations may be forced to scout executives at their competitors after scaling back recruitment and succession

planning during the reces-sion, according to Ana Dutra, Chicago- based CEO of Korn/Ferry International’s leadership and talent consulting business.

“Companies cut down on lead-ership development programs and coaching,” she said in a phone interview.

“Now they’re finding them-selves essentially with a gap, with a void between the top lay-ers and the next layers of the organization.”

Another trend resulting from the improving economy: The per-centage of CEO hires with expe-rience in financial jobs dropped to the lowest level since 2006 last year after peaking at 44.2 percent in 2007, according to the Crist-Kolder study.

It’s a sign there’s less need for an executive who can shepherd a company through financial stress than for one who can build rev-enue and leverage new markets, Crist Kolder’s McGreal said.

WP-BLOOMBERG

Turkmenistan plans sell-offs, but not oil, gas Transport, communications and construction to be privatised; new gas routes planned to bypass Russia

HARARE: Impala Platinum, the world’s number two pro-ducer of platinum on Friday sealed a deal to sell a 51-percent stake in its Zimbabwean unit Zimplats under a state-imposed black empowerment scheme.

The deal will see Impala get $971m (¤731m) executive Terence Goodlace said, making it one of the largest empowerment trans-actions in Zimbabwe to date.

“We are pleased that after two years of hard work and diligence, we have produced an acceptable solution,” Goodlace said at a deal-signing ceremony in Harare.

“The uncertainty that had

dogged Zimplats during the nego-tiations is now hopefully a thing of the past,” said Goodlace.

The agreement is in compliance with a controversial indigenisa-tion law that President Robert Mugabe signed in 2010.

The law forces foreign-owned companies - including banks and retailers — to cede 51 percent ownership to black Zimbabwean investors.

Mugabe, who a decade ago launched a campaign to seize white-owned farmland, has threatened to take over firms which do not comply.

The plan is for the

Australian-listed Zimplats to transfer 10 percent of shares to workers, 10 percent to a com-munity trust where its mine is located and 31 percent to the gov-ernment’s National Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Fund.

Indigenisation Minister Saviour Kasukuwere said all foreign firms had no choice but to respect the equity laws.

“There will be no sacred cow spared and no stone unturned to ensure that the policy is fully implemented,” said Kasukuwere after inking signing the pact.

“Non-compliance will no longer

be tolerated.” He said the law sought to reverse colonial eco-nomic policies that pushed the majority blacks to the fringes of the mainstream economy.

The Zimplats deal will be closely watched as a bellwether of Zimbabwe’s investment climate and security of operations.

Mugabe’s partner in an shaky power sharing government, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, is uneasy with the law, which he says will drive away foreign investment just as the country is recovering from a decade-long economic collapse.

AFP

LONDON: Troubled pan-European newspaper publisher Mecom has reported a 17 percent year-on-year decline in advertis-ing revenues in the final quarter of 2012, and revealed it is in dis-cussions to sell its Danish and Polish operations.

The London stock market-listed company, which was founded by former Mirror Group chief execu-tive David Montgomery, said that the advertising decline was at least a slight improvement on the 20 percent fall reported in the third quarter last year.

Mecom, which ousted CEO Tom Toumazis in July after less than a year, gave an update to sharehold-ers on a strategic review of the business in a pre-close statement on Friday, ahead of reporting final results for 2012. The publisher said that it has received “expressions of interest” from buyers looking at acquiring Mecom’s entire Danish newspaper operation. “[Mecom] will invite a small number of poten-tial buyers to conduct due diligence shortly,” the company added.

Mecom said that it has also entered into exclusive discus-sions with one buyer to offload its Polish operation. However, it is still struggling to find a buyer for its flagship Dutch business, which accounts for almost 60 per-cent of group revenues and more than 80 percent of profits, saying that offers to date have “not been acceptable”.

Mecom said it is examining a number of offers for specific parts of the Dutch business, includ-ing some of its standalone digital operations. The company said that it expects 2012 earnings before, interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation to be about ¤89m. Net debt stands at ¤130m, a gear-ing of about 1.5 times earnings.

Stephen Davidson, executive chairman of Mecom, said: “During a period of sustained economic pressure and notwithstanding the additional demands of the strate-gic review processes, our people remain committed to the improve-ment and modernisation of our products and businesses.

“In 2013 we expect further ben-efits to come from restructuring initiatives and the launch of new subscription packages that provide our readers different and innova-tive ways to access our content.” GUARDIAN NEWS

LONDON: Two European air-lines said yesterday they were halting services to Iran, a sign of the crumbling purchasing power of Iranians as their econ-omy buckles under the weight of Western sanctions.

Air France-KLM will suspend its Amsterdam-Tehran service starting April 2013, a spokesman for the carrier said. It currently flies to Iran four times a week.

Austrian Airlines, a unit of Germany’s Deutsche Lufthansa, is cancelling its services to Iran due to a lack of demand, a spokes-man said. The carrier’s last flight from Vienna to Tehran will be on January 13.

It used to fly to Tehran four times a week, but reduced that to three in November.

The Iranian rial has lost about two thirds of its value against the US dollar in the last year, following US sanctions on its central bank and a European Union embargo of Iranian oil, lev-ied over Iran’s disputed nuclear programme.

That depreciation has made imported goods and foreign plane tickets far more expensive for Iranians.

A spokesman for Lufthansa said the German carrier was con-tinuing to fly to Tehran five times a week. Italian airline Alitalia also flies to Iran, according to its website.

The US and its European allies fear Iran is trying to build a bomb under the cover of a civil-ian nuclear programme. Iran says its programme is purely peaceful.

The sanctions against Iran’s energy and banking sectors have made it more difficult for the Iranian government to earn for-eign currency, raising concern that the central bank will not be able to defend the rial and depressing its value.

Airlines already had to think twice over whether to maintain services to the country since Iran said in 2011 it had stopped provid-ing fuel to European aircraft in retaliation for their refusal to fuel Iranian planes.

Austrian Airlines suspended its service to Tehran for more than two months last summer because it could not be sure of getting its planes refuelled there.

REUTERS

Mecom suffers 17pc decline in advertising revenues

Two airlines to suspend Iran flights as sanctions bite

US firms hiring more CEOs from outside

Impala sells 51pc of Zimbabwe platinum business

20 BUSINESS VIEWSSUNDAY 13 JANUARY 2013


New Saudi refineries to reduce crude oil export cushion BY DANIEL FINEREN AND HUMEYRA PAMUK

Saudi Arabia’s drive to build new refineries means its maximum capacity to export crude, the big gun it aims at

other producers wanting higher oil prices, is set to decline over the next five years. Major oil importers are not alarmed, as actual Saudi crude exports are well below their maximum and because more US and Iraqi crude will become available. But India’s refining industry has reason to worry about the emergence of a rival processing more than a mil-lion barrels a day.

The three new refineries, each able to process 400,000 barrels per day (bpd) of mainly heavy crude, could consume nearly a tenth of the kingdom’s current officially declared production capacity of 12.5 million bpd when they are all fully operational in 2017.

Saudi Arabia has so far used its unique ability to produce much more crude than needed to coun-ter price hawks led by Iran in the Organisation of the Petroleum

Exporting Countries and keep prices at levels that do not over burden the world economy.

Now the world’s largest crude exporter has invested tens of bil-lions of dollars raising refinery capacity to maximise profits by selling more products while cut-ting a fuel import bill that has ballooned since 2007 as domestic demand grew.

The trio of refineries will con-tinue major exports of petroleum in the form of diesel and petrol, moderating any erosion of the kingdom’s overall clout in crude oil markets. Some traders at Asian refiners, the biggest buy-ers of Saudi crude, were relaxed about the availability of crude.

“I am not worried about the supply situation. Supply of crude is ample, especially from the Gulf,” a trader at north Asian refiner said. “Iraq’s production is increasing, that could make up. But, refining margins will definitely be a concern if Saudi Arabia begins to export products.”

Fereidun Fesharaki, chairman of Facts Global Energy, said the new refineries will result in lower exports of Arab Heavy crude, one

of the Saudi grades, pushing up its prices. “Despite growing demand at home, most of the products will go to exports and have a regional impact on product markets and the flow of products globally,” Fesharaki said in FGE’s latest global refining report.

Even when making up for sup-ply losses from Libya and Iran over the last two years, Saudi Arabia has rarely needed to pump more than 10 million bpd and Saudi officials have said they see no need to increase capacity beyond the current sustainable levels of around 12.5 million bpd.

A surge in North American shale oil production and rising Iraqi exports have taken much of the pressure off Riyadh to main-tain such a large and costly spare capacity cushion that it has never and may never test.

“The rapid increase in shale oil production will lower US import of crude oil from the Middle East in the next few years,” a senior trader at a western oil company in Singapore said, adding that lower US demand would push more west African crude into Asia. “Margins will be affected if

Saudi products hit the markets, especially with the global economy slowing as well, unless there are more closures of old refineries,” he said. Saudi Arabia’s move from selling only crude toward more value-added products aims to diversify its economy and should be profitable, especially as the refineries will use mostly heavy and sour oil that it now sells at a discount to other grades.

“More of our liquids production can travel farther down the value chain, rather than being exported as crude oil, refined products or natural gas liquids,” state run oil company Saudi Aramco says on its web page. As the new refiner-ies use more crude, Aramco may run its existing oil wells harder but it is already spending to offset declining production from older fields. Unless it invests yet more heavily to build more capacity, its maximum crude export potential will fall.

Rapidly rising domestic demand for vehicle fuels and power plants has seen implied Saudi crude oil use rise to an average of 2.4 mil-lion bpd in the 12 months to the end of October, 2012, according

to Reuters analysis of official fig-ures available through the Joint Oil Data Initiative (JODI).

By comparison, the gap between Saudi production and exports in the same period of 2005 was 1.9 million bpd, pointing to a 20 per-cent rise in Saudi crude use over the last five years.

Current Saudi crude consump-tion rates cap its annual average crude exports at around 10.1 mln bpd, with more available in win-ter and less in summer when air-conditioning needs are high.

Adding another 1.2 million bpd of refinery capacity raises poten-tial Saudi crude use to 3.6 million bpd by 2017, unless it succeeds in reducing the oil it burns for power generation.

If not accompanied by a rise in crude production capacity that more than offsets declines in maturing fields, increasing refin-ery use could reduce maximum export capacity to around 9 mil-lion bpd in five years time.

Whether that will be an issue for world oil markets is unclear, as even when Saudi production averaged a record of 9.9 million bpd in the first nine months of

2012, its crude exports averaged just 7.5 million bpd.

So Saudi Arabia could still increase exports by 1.5 million bpd above the record levels sold in that period, even if the three refineries due online over the next five years were already running flat out.

By far the largest of the new Saudi oilfields on the horizon is Manifa, which is expected to pro-duce around 500,000 bpd by mid-2013 and hit full flow of 900,000 bpd of heavy crude in 2014.

“The key thing for me is what happens with Manifa... If Manifa is only replacing decline in other fields, then that of course implies a shift from exports to more domestic use,” Robin Mills of UAE-based energy consultancy Manaarco said.

If oil use in power generation can be controlled by more gas use, Saudi Arabia will remain a signifi-cant oil product exporter. But its net exports of crude and products could drop by 600,000-1,100,000 bpd by 2020, depending on the pace of Saudi demand, unless it raises crude output further, Mills said. REUTERS

BY RACHELLE YOUNGLAI AND SARAH N LYNCH

US President Barack Obama broke the mold on Thursday by choosing a budget wonk to serve as US Treasury secretary, leaving gaps on the interna-tional and financial side that could make for a rocky transition.

Jack Lew, Obama’s chief of staff, was chosen to lead the Treasury Department as the White House heads into another round of difficult talks with Congress on how to put the nation on a sound fiscal path.

By tapping a two-time White House budget director, Obama signalled the importance he places on the ongoing budget battles.

If the Senate confirms Lew, as widely expected, the budget expert’s most pressing task will be to ensure that Congress raises the nation’s debt ceiling in time for the United States to avoid a damaging default and credit-rating downgrades.

In selecting a Washington insider, Obama has potentially left the Treasury Department with holes in crucial areas: financial markets, regulation and international economics.

Obama’s outgoing Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, was previously president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, where part of his job was to liaise with Wall Street and regulate big banks. He also had held top positions in President Bill Clinton’s Treasury Department and at the International Monetary Fund.

Geithner’s immediate predecessor, former Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson, was also deeply steeped in the ways of Wall Street, as was Geithner’s boss during the Clinton administration, then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin.

“Jack Lew is by all accounts highly qualified to be secretary of the Treasury,” said Dennis Kelleher, the chief executive of the left-leaning group Better Markets, which supports tougher financial regulation.

“The one area of concern is whether or not he is sufficiently committed to quickly and thoroughly implementing financial reform and re-regulating Wall Street.”

Bankers and other financial services executives privately expressed concern that Lew lacked financial markets experience, even though he worked on Wall Street for two years. Sheila Bair, a former bank regulator, told CNBC television on Wednesday that “someone with a little broader perspective would be good.”

Lew, who is known as a strong administrator, admitted his financial experience was scant when he was vetted by the Senate to serve as a State Department deputy secretary and then as Obama’s budget chief.

At a Senate Budget Committee hearing in September 2010, he was pressed by Senator Bernie Sanders for his views on whether deregulation contributed significantly to the 2007-2009 financial crisis.

“I don’t consider myself an expert in some of these aspects of the financial industry,” Lew responded. “My experience with the financial industry has been as a manager, not as an investment adviser.” “I don’t personally know the extent to which deregulation drove it, but I don’t believe that deregulation was the, you know, proximate cause,” he added.

Those comments upset Sanders, a political independent who supports tougher regulation. Sanders voted against Lew’s selec-tion as budget chief, and on Thursday said he was prepared to vote against him again.

While Lew is expected to win confirmation, he could face a fair amount of opposition from a combination of left-leaning, pro-regulation lawmakers like Sanders and Republicans who have clashed with the nominee in past budget talks.

During his time on Wall Street, Lew was the chief operat-ing officer of Citigroup’s global wealth management division. He later became COO for Citi Alternative Investments, a largely administrative role that was apart from investment decisions that portfolio managers would have made.

“I found that things he was responsible for doing worked bet-ter after he joined,” said Todd Thomson, who headed Citigroup’s wealth management unit in 2006 and hired Lew. “He’s very good at working across an organisation, and bringing people together to resolve issues.” Lew joined Citi on the recommendation of former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who was then chair-man of Citigroup’s executive committee. Rubin knew Lew from their time together in the Clinton administration.

Outside of Washington policy circles, Lew is little known. A number of financial officials in Asia and Europe drew a blank when asked by Reuters for their appraisal.

Lew’s selection could put pressure on the Obama administra-tion to find a deputy with business and financial experience to help round out Lew’s deep knowledge of Congress and the budget. Current Treasury No. 2 Neal Wolin is expected to depart once he assures a smooth transition is in place. REUTERS

Obama’s nominee untested outside budget expertise

Next US energy chief may go back to roots

BY TIMOTHY GARDNER

The next head of the US Department of Energy is likely to guide the agency through a fundamental shift: easing up on a push to commercialise renewable

energy and instead focusing on the surpris-ing domestic oil and gas boom and manage-ment of US nuclear security.

US President Barack Obama is widely believed to be considering candidates to replace Energy Secretary Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize winning physicist who man-aged an ill-fated $40bn effort to promote the green economy with loans and grants to solar, wind and biofuel companies.

The programme, part of the 2009 eco-nomic stimulus bill, suffered a public rela-tions nightmare when solar panel maker Solyndra and battery manufacturer A123 declared bankruptcy last year after receiv-ing hundreds of millions of dollars in US backed financial assistance.

“The four years under Chu were the least typical of the entire DOE,” said Paul Bledsoe, an independent energy consultant. The agency was formed by President Jimmy Carter in 1977 in response to high oil prices after the Arab oil embargo.

“They had this huge amount of money to push out the door, which became not only a priority but a challenge to spend wisely,” said Bledsoe, a former White House aide to Bill Clinton.

The focus at the DOE in the years ahead is likely to return to where about two-thirds

of its budget goes: security of nuclear weap-ons, reactors and waste.

“DOE policy is going back to a business-as-usual situation where, essentially, mili-tary nuclear spending tail-wags the energy policy dog,” said Robert Alvarez, of the Institute for Policy Studies who was a sen-ior DOE official in the 1990s.

The agency’s renewable energy initiatives will permanently move back to research and development and away from commercializa-tion, said Bledsoe.

DOE sources and analysts at think tanks in Washington said an announcement from Chu to step down could come any day, with a replacement to be named within weeks, possibly after the January 21 inauguration.

The administration would not officially comment on whether Chu will step down. None of the potential candidates for the job commented either.

Two of those thought to be on the short-list have deep experience on nuclear issues.

Christine Gregoire, the outgoing governor of Washington state, has had a long career working with the federal government to clean up the nuclear waste mess at the fed-eral Hanford Site in her state.

Ashton Carter, the deputy secretary of defense, led a program to dismantle thou-sands of nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union. Carter’s experience manag-ing money and annual procurement at the Pentagon could also make him a strong can-didate, said David Goldwyn, who led inter-national energy affairs at both the State Department and the DOE.

Former politicians, though, could be bet-ter suited for the position because they could better handle calls from members of Congress to hack away at the DOE budget, some analysts contend.

“The primary job of the secretary is to protect the DOE’s core budget in the face of Congress. This is an area where a politician might do the job best,” Goldwyn said.

Byron Dorgan, the former senator of North Dakota, could be another good choice, said Charles Ebinger, the director of the Energy Security Initiative at the Brookings Institution.

Dorgan once chaired the Senate energy and natural resources committee and is now a fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank peppered with former lawmakers.

Other politicians mentioned include former Colorado governor Bill Ritter, who helped reform regulations on oil and gas in his state. Ritter now advocates for respon-sible oil and gas drilling from a post at Colorado State University.

Susan Tierney, a former assistant sec-retary for policy at the DOE, has also been mentioned as a candidate, although she withdrew from the running for deputy energy secretary in 2009.

Chu, who joined the department in 2009, had next to no experience dealing with the oil and natural gas industry and was tagged by critics as a symbol of the Obama administration’s efforts to move away from petroleum.

REUTERS

Cartoon Arts International / The New York Times Syndicate

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TENDERS

GLOBAL ECONOMIC CRISIS MAP (GECM)

South Korea’s economic growth lower than global average in 2012

SEOUL: South Korea’s economic growth rate lagged behind the global average last year, data showed Wednesday, raising concerns that the country has already lapsed into a period of low growth. According to the Ministry of Strategy and Finance, South Korea’s gross domestic product (GDP) increased 2.1 percent on-year in 2012, lower than the global average of 3.3 percent estimated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

ROMA: Youth unemployment in Italy rose to an all time high above 37 per cent in November, data showed on Tuesday, putting pressure on outgoing Prime Minister Mario Monti who is seeking a second term at national elections in February.Italy has been in a deep recession since the middle of 2011 and joblessness has risen steadily as businesses clamp down on staffing levels to cope with crumbling domestic demand.

India automakers group cuts sales forecast for third time

Trade with China falls first time in three years

Australia’s banks set to slump, economist says

SYDNEY: Australia’s major banks, whose share prices soared in 2012, may lose some of their shine in coming years as weakening commodity demand from China crimps growth in the resource-rich economy, according to a well-known US economist.Harry Dent said that Australia may well encounter a mild recession by the end of 2014 as a global slowdown sparked by Europe’s inability to resolve its debt crisis hurts China’s economy over the next couple of years.

South Africa: Eurozone crisis ‘Biggest Risk for 2013’

Argentina losing LNG supplies to Brazil, Japan, South Korea

JOHANNESBURG: Businesses in South Africa have lost an estimated US$15-billion in revenues as a result of the ongoing eurozone crisis, with four in 10 companies affected globally and an increasing number looking to do business elsewhere, says consultancy Grant Thornton.

BUENOS AIRES: Stiff competition from drought hit Brazil and energy hungry Asia is posing difficulties for Argentina in its hunt for vital supplies of liquefied natural gas (LNG) for 2013, trade sources said. The intensified competition for a limited number of spot LNG cargoes has pushed prices above what Argentina currently hopes to pay, they said.

US trade deficit surges; import prices fallWASHINGTON: The Commerce Department said on Friday the trade gap increased 16 percent in November to $48.7bn. Analysts were expecting the deficit to shrink to $41.3 bn, so the report could lead some economists to trim their forecasts for economic growth in the fourth quarter.

NEW DELHI: India’s automakers’ association lowered its full-year domestic car sales forecast for the third time in six months as slowing economic growth and high interest rates continue to keep buyers from showrooms. The Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers forecast as little as no change in car sales in the year ending March 31, Sugato Sen, the deputy director general of the industry group, said in New Delhi today.

BEIJING: China’s trade with Japan fell 3.9 percent in 2012 to $329 billion, the first drop in three years, the General Administration of Customs said Thursday. The drop reflects a Chinese consumer boycott of Japanese goods sparked by a territorial row, which led to an 8.6 percent fall in imports from Japan last year. Japan fell from being China’s fourth-largest trading partner to its fifth.

Bank of England to sit tight at year’s first meeting

Italy jobless records put heat on Monti in poll race

LONDON: The Bank of England is expected to keep its key interest rate at a record-low 0.50 percent on Thursday and decide against pumping out more new cash to stimulate Britain’s weak economy, analysts said. Analysts said the BoE, which will be led by Canadian central bank chief Mark Carney from July, will likely sit tight at its first monetary policy meeting of 2013 amid stubbornly high British inflation and easing global economic strains.

Every Sunday

SPORT24 SUNDAY 13 JANUARY 2013


Deng shines as Bulls beat Knicks Durant scores 42 as Thunder rout LakersNEW YORK: Luol Deng scored 33 points in Chicago’s 108-101 NBA win over the Knicks in New York yesterday, with Derrick Rose’s appearance on the practice court raising hopes of even better things to come.

Deng’s 33 point tally was his best of the season, improving on the 29 the British forward scored in a four-point Bulls victory against the Knicks on December 21.

“Honestly it’s not about the scoring,” he said. “I just want to play well. I score for the team, but I don’t go out trying to get big numbers. I never focus on one thing.”

Carlos Boozer scored 17 points and Richard Hamilton added 14 for the Bulls, who never trailed and are now 3-0 against the Knicks this season.

“It feels great,” said Chicago’s Joakim Noah. “Everybody’s locked in when we play the Knicks.”

Chicago’s victory spoiled the return of Knicks star Carmelo Anthony after he served a one-game suspension for confronting Boston forward Kevin Garnett after Monday’s 102-96 defeat in New York.

Anthony finished with 39 points on 14-of-32 shooting but couldn’t prevent the Knicks from dropping a third straight game.

Chicago dominated most of the

game, and even after the Knicks engineered a 12-0 scoring run late in the fourth quarter the Bulls were able to hang on.

Even before the victory, the Bulls had reason to be pleased as Rose, the 2011 NBA Most Valuable Player, took part in the pre-game shoot-around, stretch-ing with his teammates and firing off some jump shots.

Bulls head coach Tom Thibodeau said Rose, who has been sidelined since he tore a knee ligament in the first game of the playoffs last April, is “getting closer” to being able to be exposed to contact in practice.

And he said the young star, who is expected back after the mid-February All-Star break, is coping admirably with the rehab process.

“He’s a great team player. He’s

mentally strong, has a great will,” Thibodeaux said. “He understands what he has to go through.”

Kevin Durant delivered 42 points, eight rebounds and five assists Friday as Oklahoma City dealt the reeling Los Angeles Lakers a sixth straight NBA defeat, 116-101.

Russell Westbrook scored 27 points with 10 assists and Kevin Martin chipped in 15 points for the Thunder, who have won four of their last five games.

“A great team win for us,” said Durant. “My teammates did a good job of getting me the ball. We moved the ball so well, which makes it easy for everybody.”

Meanwhile, nothing seems easy these days for the Lakers.

Kobe Bryant led Los Angeles with 28 points and Antawn Jamison contributed 19 points and 10 rebounds, but the Lakers have now lost six in a row for the first time since a seven-game skid from March 2-15 in 2007.

“We played hard the whole game, but they were just better,” Lakers head coach Mike D’Antoni said. “They were just longer, faster, better team-wise and we crumbled away.”

The Lakers were again without Dwight Howard, who is nursing a shoulder injury, and Pau Gasol, who is recovering from a concus-sion. AGENCIES

Schaub facing big test against PatriotsNEW YORK: Houston Texans quarterback Matt Schaub starts his first road play-off game, at the New England Patriots today, with the pressure on.

The Patriots, corning in from a bye week, loom as favorites in the American Football Conference (AFC) divisional round clash as they look to go one better than last season when they lost to the New York Giants in the Super Bowl.

New England crushed Houston 42-14 in week 14, a result which knocked the Texans off their perch and started a slump which also affected Schaub.

Although the Texans beat the Indianapolis Colts in week 15, they ended the regular season with successive losses and then were far from convincing in the 19-13 wild-card round win over the Cincinnati Bengals.

Schaub has thrown just one touchdown in those four games and has made three interceptions and given up 10 sacks.

The intense atmosphere of a road game in the playoffs will test all of the 31-year-old’s character.

“I think he will be ready,” said Texans wide receiver Andre Johnson.

“He’s working his butt off like he’s done every week. I think just getting his first (playoff) win probably got a monkey off his back because that is some-thing people talked about,” he said.

Schaub missed out on the play-offs last year due to injury but his opposite number Tom Brady has no shortage of post-season experience.

Brady has won 16 playoff games, a league record that he shares, for the moment, with Joe Montana.

He has also played in five Super Bowls, winning three of them, but he believes track records go out of the window when it comes to the playoffs.

“I played games early in my career when I had no experience and I did pretty well,” he told reporters. REUTERS

Oklahoma City Thunder Russell Westbrook gestures after making a three point shot against the Los Angeles Lakers, during first half action of their NBA game in Los Angeles, California, USA, yesterday. The Thunder beat the Lakers 116-101.

Sapp, Strahan among Hall of Fame finalistsCANTON, Ohio: Defensive stars Warren Sapp and Michael Strahan are among the final-ists announced yesterday for the Pro Football Hall of Fame Class of 2013.

Sapp and Strahan are among four players eligible for the first time, along with Larry Allen and Jonathan Ogden.

Eleven more candidates are eli-gible from the “modern era” along with two senior nominees.

All 17 will be considered for election when the Hall of Fame’s Selection Committee meets on February 2 in New Orleans, on the eve of the Super Bowl.

Sapp was a seven-time Pro Bowl defensive tackle in a 13-year NFL career with Tampa Bay and Oakland from 1995-2007, helping the Buccaneers win a Super Bowl title in 2002.

Strahan played 15 seasons at defensive end with the New York Giants from 1993-2007 and went out as a Super Bowl champion, helping his team to a 17-14 win over previously undefeated New England in the title game.

The other modern-era finalists are wide receivers Cris Carter, Tim Brown and Andre Reed, running back Jerome Bettis, defensive end/linebackers Kevin Greene and Charles Haley, guard Will Shields, cornerback Aeneas Williams, coach Bill Parcells and owners Art Modell and Eddie DeBartolo jnr.

Defensive tackle Curley Culp and linebacker Dave Robinson are the senior nominees. AFP

Rookie Henley leads Sony OpenHONOLULU, Hawaii: US PGA Tour rookie Russell Henley carded a sparkling 63 yesterday to seize a two-shot lead in the $5.6m Sony Open.

Henley, playing his first tour-nament as a tour member, had a two-round total of 14-under par 126 -- breaking the 36-hole record at this tournament by two strokes.

He teed off on 10 on the par-70 Waialae Country Club course and notched seven birdies without a bogey to separate himself from playing partner and fellow rookie Scott Langley and Scott Piercy.

Langley, the overnight leader after a first-round 62, carded a 66 for 128. Piercy joined him on 12-under with a second straight 64.

“It’s pretty surreal,” Henley said, adding that his main aim as he approached his first season on tour was to try to play his game, learn and become a better player.

“I think with that mindset it takes a little pressure off me,” the 23-year-old said.

He certainly didn’t look as if he felt any pressure on Friday, when he hit every green in regulation.

“I didn’t make every putt that was close, but I was hitting great putts, hitting them like I want to hit them, and some were falling. So I’m happy about it,” he said.

Henley said he benefited from playing with fellow rookie Langley, who birdied his last three holes to stay in the hunt.

The two, who tied for low ama-teur honors at the 2010 US Open at Pebble Beach, will play together again in the final group today.

“It’s never easy to back up a really good round, I kind of got off to a little slower start,” Langley said.

“But it was certainly nice to finish the way I did and kind of get back in it with Russ.”

Matt Kuchar, winner of the

Players Championship last year, carded a 63 and was alone in fourth on 129.

South African Tim Clark (66), Chris Kirk (62) and Charles Howell (64) were tied on 130.

Kirk’s effort included two eagles, at the par-five ninth and the par-five 18th.

Clark, who was hampered much of last season with nagging elbow pain, said he thought he now had the problem under control.

“Obviously, I’ve still got to take care of myself and look after it,” Clark said.

“But at least coming out to the golf course, I feel like I’m pretty much 100 percent.”

Dustin Johnson, winner of the season-opening Tournament of Champions at Kapalua, which was reduced to 54 holes and finished on Tuesday because of weather, withdrew after nine holes of the second round because of illness.

AFP

Russell Henley putts on the

13th hole green during the

second round of the Sony

Open in Hawaii at Waialae

Country Club in Honolulu,

Hawaii, yesterday.

Ishikawa, Wiratchant get Masters invitationsTOKYO: Japan’s Ryo Ishikawa (pictuered) and Thailand’s Thaworn Wiratchant have received invitations to play in this year’s Masters at Augusta, tournament organisers said yesterday.

“The Masters has long estab-lished a tradition of supporting the global game, and we were excited to extend invitations to Thaworn Wiratchant and Ryo Ishikawa, who we hope will pro-vide added interest and enthusi-asm for golf in Asia through their participation in the tournament,” Augusta National Golf Club chair-man Billy Payne said.

The tournament is scheduled for April 11-14.

Wiratchant, who became the oldest winner of the Asian Tour Order of Merit by topping the money list in 2012, will be mak-ing his first Masters appearance.

The 46-year-old holds the Asian Tour record for most career victories, having won for the 15th time at the Indian Open last October.

The Thai golfer was ecstatic after his new year resolution

of making a Masters debut was fulfilled so unexpect-edly.

“ W h e n my manager i n f o r m e d me, I initially thought she was joking,” he told the Asian Tour.

“I didn’t expect to r e c e i v e an invitation and I was plan-ning to work hard to break into the world’s top-50 (by the end of March) to qualify for the Masters.”

Wiratchant will become the fourth Thai after Sukree Onsham, Thongchai Jaidee and Prayad Marksaeng to tee off at the Augusta National and making the cut for the weekend rounds will be his top priority.

“I’ll try to make the cut... that would be the goal. If I don’t make it, then I want to ensure that I

had played my best,” he said. “The players at the Masters are all good players and it is a very challenging golf course.

“Every year, I watch the Masters on TV and I think to myself that it’s such a difficult golf course.

“I have spoken to Thongchai and Prayad about their experi-ences in the Masters previously and I will talk to them again to find out more about the golf course.

“From what I’ve seen, you have to be good in every department, especially around the greens which are very fast and tricky. I am sure it will be really challeng-ing but I am looking forward to my first trip there.”

Wiratchant hoped his late debut will be an inspiration for other players on the Asian Tour who aspire to play in the Masters and the other majors.

This edition will also mark the 21-year-old Ishikawa’s fifth consecutive start at the Masters where he has missed the cut on three occasions and finished tied for 20th in 2011. AFP

PGA Tour Sony Open126 Russell Henley 63-63

128 Scott Langley 62-66, Scott Piercy 64-64

129 Matt Kuchar 66-63

130 Chris Kirk 68-62, Tim Clark (RSA) 64-66, Charles Howell 66-64

131 Pat Perez 68-63

132 Stephen Ames (CAN) 65-67, Danny Lee (NZL) 66-66, Scott Gardiner (AUS) 68-64, Tim Herron 66-66

133 Jeff Overton 65-68

134 John Rollins 68-66, Vijay Singh (FIJ) 67-67, John Huh 71-63, Alistair Presnell (AUS) 68-66, Henrik Norlander (SWE) 70-64, Matt Jones (AUS) 66-68, Rory Sabbatini (RSA) 69-65, Brian Stuard 66-68

135 Bart Bryant 68-67, Webb Simpson 66-69, Tommy Gainey 66-69, David Mathis 69-66, Dicky Pride 68-67, Erik Compton 67-68, Hideto Tanihara (JPN) 70-65, Lee Williams 69-66, Ricky Barnes 70-65, John Senden (AUS) 69-66, Ryan Palmer 67-68, Marc Leishman (AUS) 67-68, Shawn Stefani 68-67

NBA ResultsToronto 99 Charlotte 78

Boston 103 Houston 91

Brooklyn 99 Phoenix 79

Atlanta 103 Utah 95

Chicago 108 NY Knicks 101

Memphis 101 San Antonio 98

New Orleans 104 Minnesota 92

Detroit 103 Milwaukee 87

Denver 98 Cleveland 91

Oklahoma City 116 LA Lakers 101

Golden State 103 Portland 97

Jamieson poised for Durban doubleDURBAN, South Africa: Scott Jamieson is set up to win two European Tour events in this Indian Ocean city within two months after taking a five-shot lead yesterday three rounds into the Volvo Golf Champions.

Jamieson fired a four-under-par 68 for a total of 201 at Durban Country Club to move clear of Thai Thongchai Jaidee, Julien Quesne of France and South African Louis Oosthuizen.

The Scot won the first event of the 2013 European Tour -- the inaugural Nelson Mandela Championship -- last month at another Durban course after the tournament was cut to two rounds by torrential rain.

He is alone among the 33 com-petitors in having shot three sub-70 ruonds over the 6,111-metre track. AFP

25SPORT SUNDAY 13 JANUARY 2013


Shane clinches stunning win in Oryx Cup UIM World Championship final

Armstrong ‘plans to admit doping’ in Oprah interviewLOS ANGELES: Lance Armstrong plans to admit to doping for the first time in an interview with Oprah Winfrey that will be taped tomorrow at the disgraced cyclist’s home in Austin, Texas, USA Today reported.

In an article posted on its web-site yesterday night, USA Today cited “a person with knowl-edge of the situation” as saying Armstrong plans to admit to dop-ing throughout his career, but that he probably will not go into great detail about specific cases and events.

The announcement that Armstrong had agreed to an interview, to air on Winfrey’s OWN cable TV network on Thursday, sparked widespread speculation that he might finally confess to being a drug cheat after years of strenuous denials.

It will be Armstrong’s first interview since he was stripped in October of his seven Tour de France titles after the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) said he helped orchestrate the most sophisticated doping program in sports history.

Nicole Nichols of Winfrey’s OWN network said on Wednesday “no question is off-limits” in the

interview, for which Armstrong will not receive any payment.

Last week, The New York Times reported that Armstrong, 41, was considering publicly admitting that he used banned performance-enhancing drugs in an apparent bid to return to competitive sport in marathons and triathlons.

On her Twitter feed Tuesday, Winfrey said: “Looking forward to this conversation with @lancearmstrong”.

Armstrong retweeted that message on his own Twitter account.

Not everyone is convinced that such an interview is the proper venue for Armstrong to address the charges against him.

“Only Lance would get to have his moment of truth, if that’s what it will be, in front of Oprah Winfrey,” said British cyclist David Millar, who served a two-year ban after admitting doping in 2004 and is now a member of the athletes’ commission for the World Anti-Doping Agency.

“It is not sitting in front of a judge or a disciplinary hearing being properly questioned about the things he has done wrong.”

Any confess ion by Armstrong could have legal or

financial ramifications. Since the International Cycling Union effec-tively erased him from the sport’s record books, British newspaper The Sunday Times has already sued Armstrong for more than £1m ($1.6m) over a libel payment made to him in 2006.

The newspaper paid Armstrong £300,000 to settle a libel case after publishing a story suggest-ing he may have cheated, and now wants that money plus interest and legal costs repaid.

A Texas insurance company has also threatened legal action to recoup millions of dollars in bonuses that it paid to him for multiple Tour victories.

His years of dominance in the sport’s greatest race raised cycling’s profile in the United States to new heights and gave Armstrong, a cancer survivor, a unique platform to promote can-cer awareness and research.

The Lance Armstrong Foundation has raised almost $500m since its creation in 1997.

In the wake of the allegations, several top sponsors dropped Armstrong and the on November 14 his name was dropped from the charity he founded, which is now known as the Livestrong Foundation. AFP

A file picture taken on July 22, 2004 shows Yellow jersey US Lance Armstrong (US Postal/USA) celebrating as he crosses the finish line and wins the 17th stage of the 91st Tour de France cycling race between Bourg-d’Oisans and Le Grand Bornand.

DOHA: U-5 Graham Trucking’s Jimmy Shane snatched a dra-matic victory in the Oryx Cup UIM World Championship in Doha Bay yesterday to con-clude the 2012 season of rac-ing in the Air National Guard H1 Unlimited Hydroplane Championship.

Six of the fastest power boats on the planet lined up at the start and Shane became the fourth dif-ferent winner of the Oryx Cup in as many years after leading from start-to-finish to hold off a fierce challenge from runner-up and newly-crowned National High Points champion Steve David in U-6 Oh Boy! Oberto.

Jon Zimmerman finished a dis-tant third in U-9 Jones Racing, Brian Perkins was fourth at the helm of U-88 Snoqualmie Casino and Tom Thompson struggled at the back of the field with engine issues and made the finish in fifth place with U-11 Miss Peters & May J Michael Kelly (U-37 Miss Beacon Plumbing) was disquali-fied on the start lap for failure to follow race officials’ instructions.

“It’s been a great first season in this championship for me and to cap it with a win in the Oryx Cup is superb,” said an ecstatic Shane.

“I must congratulate Jimmy on a great drive today,” said David sportingly.

“It was not meant to be, but there is always next time.”

Under the presidency of Sheikh Hassan bin Jabot Al Thani, the Qatar Marine Sports Federation (QMSF) hosted a 25-minute Marathon Aqua Bike Race two hours before the main Oryx Cup UIM World Championship event. Twenty-four Qatari, Kuwaiti and Emirati racers took part in the 10-lap race on a tricky, wind-affected 2.5-mile course around the island in Doha Bay and there were 14 finishers.

Thamer Ahmad Abu Faisal held off a strong challenge from fellow Qataris Waleed Mahmoud Al-Sharshani and Rashid Rashid Al-Mohanadi to seal victory and the first cash prize of 20,000 Qatari riyals. Ahmad Rashid Al-Dauas and Mohsen Al-Hajri completed the top five, albeit one lap behind.

Oryx Cup UIM World Championship final

Steve David (U-6), Jon Zimmerman (U-9), Tom Thompson (U-11), Jimmy Shane (U-5), Brian Perkins (U-88) and J Michael Kelly (U-37) started the five-lap final on Doha Bay and lane choice was left to how the boats lined up when they

Runner-up spot for David; Abu Faisal wins Qatar Marathon Race hosted by QMSF

Steve David (left), Oryx Cup winner Jimmy Shane (centre) and Jon Zimmerman (right) during the podium ceremony at Doha Bay yesterday. RIGHT: Action from the Oryx Cup UIM World Championship at Doha Bay yesterday.

Qatar Aquabike Marathon race

podium finishers with Khalid bin

Arhama Al Kuwari of the QMSF.

RIGHT: Qatar’s Thamer Ahmad

Abu Faisal, winner of the

Qatar Aquabike Marathon race in action on Doha Bay yesterday.

entered the course (‘get in score’ or ‘score-up’) one-minute before they took the flying start. Kelly ran as the ‘trailer’ boat and had to start five seconds behind the other five racers.

The race was delayed by 40 minutes because an exception-ally low tide made it impossible

to crane the boats on to the pon-toon, but eventually got underway at 3.40hrs. Kelly was dramati-cally disqualified before the boats reached the back straight on the warm-up lap for failing to leave the inside lane and that left the door open for Shane to edge in front of David through the start

and the first turn. The Maryland driver, who confirmed the run-ner-up spot in the National High Points title race this weekend, had the measure of David and the Florida man had no answer to the speed of the U-5 Graham Trucking hydroplane. As the race progressed and Thompson

struggled at the rear of the field and Perkins began to fall behind, Shane and David edged clear of Zimmerman.

Shane drive a faultless race to take the chequered flag and become the fourth racer in as many years to win the Oryx Cup, his success depriving David of a

clean sweep of all the heats and final in Doha. Boats and race equipment will remain in Qatar for the next four weeks and the American teams and drivers will return for the start of the 2013 Air National Guard H1 Unlimited Championship at the start of February. THE PENINSULA

SPORT26SUNDAY 13 JANUARY 2013


QIRRCH: Dominant West grabs double at Losail

Aussie rider West renews deal with QMMF Racing TeamDOHA: Anthony West renewed his contract with the Qatar Motor and Motorcycling Federation (QMMF) Racing Team for another season in Moto2 category, yesterday.

It will be the second season that the Australian rider will be representing the QMMF Racing Team for this season’s MotoGP World Championship.

QMMF President Nasser bin Khalifa Al Attiyah and West signed the agreement after the second round of the Qatar International Road Racing Championship at Losail International Circuit (LIC), where West won the two races.

After a great end in the last season in Moto2 (with two podiums, in Malaysia and in

Australia) West believes that this season will be a great suc-cess for QMMF Racing Team.

He feels very good being part of this team and hopes to bring more success and be in the podium more races.

Al Attiyah stated that he is very happy with the perform-ance of the Australian rider and he believes that this coming sea-son will be a great season for the QMMF Racing Team.

LIC will host the season’s opening round of the champion-ship on April 7.

The Qatar MotoGP is the only night race in the championship calendar.

The last race of the sea-son takes place in Valencia in November. THE PENINSULA

Indian rider Krishnan wins both races in LARRC

Runner-up Nasser Al Malki (left), winner Anthony West (centre) and third place Mashel Al Naimi on the podium after the second race in the Qatar International Road Racing Championship at Losail International Circuit yesterday.

DOHA: Anthony West won both races of the Qatar International Road Racing Championship (QIRRCH) at Losail International Circuit, yesterday.

The Australian rider, who dominated the practice ses-sions on Friday, held off Britain’s Bradley Smith and compatriot Alex Cudlin, who finished in sec-ond and third places respectively in the first race.

In the afternoon race, West crossed the finish line 15.402 sec-onds ahead of Qatar’s Nasser Al Malki, who finished in second place in a BMW. Al Malki’s com-patriot Mashel Al Naimi finished in third place with a Honda.

Elsewhere, in the Losail Asian Road Racing Championship (LARRC), Indian rider Rajini Krishnan won the race, who fin-ished in seventh position overall.

His compatriot Deepak Ravikumar and Hungarian rider Nikolett Kovacs finished in sec-ond and third places respectively.

Just like West, Krishnan made it a double win, finishing first in the second race.

Ravikumar and Algerian rider Walid Benterki finished in second and third spots.

West, riding a Suzuki, led the first race from start to fin-ish despite the windy conditions to finish 7.477 seconds ahead of Smith, who will make his MotoGP debut with Yamaha when the sea-son starts at Losail on April 7.

Speaking after the race, West, who also rides for Qatar Motor and Motorcycling Federation (QMMF) Racing Team in Moto2, said: “I had a good feeling and I tried to keep my rhythm and stand on the track as there was a horrible wind all day. I am happy that I didn’t had to fight too much

because I got a good gap with the rest.

Smith admitted that he had some problems with his bike during the race. The 22-year-old Briton said: “I had some clutch problems and my start was not good. I made a mistake in the first laps and I run off the track so I lost time to be back. Then I had a good battle with Cudlin and I hope to resolve the problems in the clutch and be closer to West in second race.”

Defending champion, Cudlin, who started the first race in sec-ond position, struggled through-out the race but managed to finish in third place. Afterwards, Cudlin said he was happy with the race and enjoyed competing against Smith.

He said: “The race was good, I enjoyed with the battle with Smith. At the beginning of the race I was slow, not good feel-ing with the front of the bike. It took me some laps to get into the rhythm but then West was gone. The last two laps I lost a little bit and some mistakes make me finished in third but I am happy to race against riders of MotoGP and Moto2.”

German rider Nina Prinz made an excellent start but Prinz’s bike suffered an electrical problem and saw her chances of winning the race end when she had to retire in the seventh lap.

Qatari rider Al Malki finished in fourth position.

In the second race, despite West finishing the line first, Al Malki was said to be pleased to be in second place, after starting from the grid in fifth position.

Prinz, and Smith, both had mechanical problems and had to retire in the middle of the race.

THE PENINSULA

QIRRCH Race One Results (top five)Position Name Nationality Make Total Time

1 Anthony West AUS SUZUKI 31:11.045

2 Bradley Smith GBR YAMAHA 31:18.522

3 Alex Cudlin AUS SUZUKI 31:19.283

4 Nasser Al Malki QAT BMW 31:31.286

5 Mashel Al Naimi QAT HONDA 31:31.323

QIRRCH Race Two Results (top five)Position Name Nationality Make Total Time

1 Anthony West AUS SUZUKI 31:01.547

2 Nasser Al Malki QAT BMW 31:16.949

3 Mashel Al Naimi QAT HONDA 31:17.183

4 Alexander Cudlin AUS SUZUKI 31:20.090

5 Saeed Al Sulaiti QAT BMW 31:57.734

Dakar Rally: Peterhansel’s stage win overshadowed by third deathSALTA, ARGENTINA: Ten-time cham-pion Stephane Peterhansel extended his Dakar Rally lead on Friday night, but the world’s most gruelling endurance event was once again hit by tragedy when a French motorcyclist was killed.

As Peterhansel claimed the seventh stage which crossed the Andes between Calama in Chile and Salta in Argentina to build a lead of more than three minutes over 2011 champion Nasser Al Attiyah, the event was reeling from a third death in two days.

Competitor Thomas Bourgin, 25, was involved in a collision with a police car which was coming in the opposite direction on the link road to the start of Friday’s stage in Calama.

“The rally’s medical teams deployed on the ground were only able to certify the rider’s death, probably instant,” a statement on the race’s official website reported.

Bourgin was in 68th place in the overall motorcycling rankings of his first Dakar.

On Thursday, two people were killed in a head-on collision between a rally support vehi-cle and a taxi near Peru’s border with Chile.

Going into the 2013 event, some 59 people, including 20 spectators, had lost their lives in the race.

On Friday, Peterhansel finished the 218km run with a 39sec lead over compa-triot Guerlain Chicherit, in an SMG, with American NASCAR driver Robby Gordon, in a Hummer, 1min 08sec off the pace.

Al Attiyah, who had won his third stage of this year’s race on Thursday to slash Peterhansel’s overall lead down to 1min 18sec, was sixth on Friday in his Buggy, 1min 56sec behind.

He remains second overall, but it is now 3min 14sec behind defending champion Peterhansel.

In the motorcycling stage, America’s Kurt Caselli, on a KTM, took the honours, winning in 1hr 51min 31sec, an advantage of 1min 23sec over Chile’s Francisco Lopez and Olivier Pain of France.

Pain still leads the overall standings by 6min 06sec ahead of Lopez.

Defending champion Cyril Despres, who had been second overall, dropped to more than 14 minutes off the pace after mechanical prob-lems left him without fifth gear for half the distance.

“Cyril’s problems have given me a significant gap for the lead, and that’s a good thing for me,” said Pain.

“That’s just part of racing, but I’m not for-getting that it could happen to me too, so I’m not getting cocky about it, especially since Cyril has the capacity to claw back the time he’s lost.” Today’s eighth stage is a 247km run between Salta and Tucuman. AFP

Mechanics of the Qatari Nasser Al Attiyah team work on his vehicle at the rally camp after the seventh stage of the Rally Dakar between Calama (Chile) and Salta, Argentina, on Friday. French Stephane Peterhansel (Mini), in cars, and US Curt Caselli (KTM), on motorbikes, were the winners of the stage, that ended tragically after the death of a French pilot during a collision with a Chilean police vehicle.

Lyon go top in France Van Persie demands focus for Liverpool clashMANCHESTER, United Kingdom: Robin van Persie has urged his Manchester United team-mates not to get car-ried away by their seven-point lead at the top of the Premier League ahead of today’s clash with Liverpool.

United face their old enemies at Old Trafford and victory will put them 10 points clear of second-place Manchester City, who do not play at Arsenal until later in the day.

The Dutchman, who has netted 16 league goals this term after a £24m ($38.7m, 29.1m euros) close-season move from Arsenal, wants his side to maintain focus.

“It is only seven points, you have to look at it game by game. We still have to go through the entire second half of the league and almost play everyone one

more time,” said van Persie. “Nothing is decided. It will be tough and it will be hard. This weekend we have Liverpool and it’s a massive game for us.”

Van Persie has also warned against complacency when United meet Brendan Rodgers’ side.

“We have to look at the three points and it’s a bit like a derby, the teams being so close to each other,” said van Persie.

“There is so much history between them and there have been some great games over the years, going back a long way. They are a great team and, on their day, they can make it a really hard game for us.”

United defender Rio Ferdinand is also relishing the clash.

“I would say it is the fixture we look forward to first,” he said ahead of the match. AFP

Gulf Cup: Kuwait reach semis

Fahed Al Ebrahim (left) of Kuwait vies with Nasser Al Shamrani of Saudi Arabia during their Gulf Cup football match in Manama, yesterday. Kuwait won 1-0. In the other match, Iraq beat Yemen 2-0. Iraq will face Bahrain in the semi-finals, whereas UAE will meet Kuwait.

Anthony West (left) of Australia shakes hands with Qatar Motor and Motorcycling Federation (QMMF) President Nasser bin Khalifa Al Attiyah after West renewed his deal with QMMF Racing Team for the 2013 Moto2 season, yesterday.

PARIS: Lyon, looking to win the French title for the first time in five seasons, went top of the heap yesterday with a 2-1 win at Troyes propelling them ahead of big spenders Paris Saint Germain (PSG).

Lyon shrugged off the embar-rassment of a Cup exit in mid-week to third division Epinal after Maxime Gonalons and Samuel Umtiti, at the second attempt, found the net from two well-rehearsed corner routines - one from Steed Malbranque, the other from Arnold Mvuemba.

Benjamin Nivet gave Troyes brief hope with a fine volley sand-wiching the two goals for the visi-tors, but this latest reverse leaves them six points from safety after only two wins in their opening 20 league matches.

Remi Garde’s men now lead the table by two points after incon-sistent PSG yet again frustrated their fans Friday with a goalless

stalemate at home to Ajaccio. Lyon should have won by a wider margin but Lisandro saw his effort deflected to safety at the last by Yohann Thuram-Ullien following a cross from the right by Michel Bastos midway through the first half.

Marseille, the 2010 champi-ons, can join Lyon on 41 points if they win at relegation-threatened Sochaux today.

Lorient, seven points adrift of Marseille, were at defend-ing champions Montpellier, who have struggled this term and were thumped at Lille just before the winter break.

On Friday, PSG gave 40m-euro man Lucas Moura, who was unveiled during a press confer-ence in Doha, his Ligue 1 debut but it was fellow Brazilian native Thiago Motta who stole the headlines by being red-carded in a lacklustre 0-0 draw against Ajaccio. AGENCIES

27SPORT SUNDAY 13 JANUARY 2013


Williams of England wins Qatar Open Amateur Golf Championship

Max Williams of England, winner of the 27th edition of the Qatar Open Amateur Golf Championship, poses for a picture with the President of Qatar Golf Federation Hassan Al Nuaimi, (second left sitting) and other officials at the prize giving ceremony yesterday. Williams qualified for the Commercialbank Qatar Masters, an European Tour event, that will begin on January 23. Around 140 golfers from 33 countries competed at DGC in the three-day event which is played over a three-round, 54-hole Individual Stroke Play format. PICTURE BY: ABDUL BASIT

Starc out of Aussie ODI squad with calf injurySYDNEY: Paceman Mitchell Starc has calf muscle sore-ness and has withdrawn from Australia’s one-day squad ahead of this weekend’s second match against Sri Lanka, Cricket Australia said yesterday.

South Australian quick Kane Richardson has been called up as cover for today’s ODI against Sri Lanka at the Adelaide Oval, after Starc picked up the injury during Australia’s 107-run series opening win in Melbourne on Friday.

The left-armer took 1-25 off six overs, but his status for the remainder of the five-match ODI series remains uncertain.

The Australians are already without several fast bowlers due to injury, including Ben Hilfenhaus and Pat Cummins, although James Pattinson and Josh Hazlewood have returned from being sidelined.

“Mitchell Starc had some mild right calf soreness after the match at the MCG,” Cricket Australia physiotherapist Alex Kountouris said in a statement on Saturday.

“Whilst we are not majorly concerned about it, we have

withdrawn him from the game on Sunday as a precaution.

“He will be reassessed over the next few days and he is a possi-bility to play in next weekend’s matches against Sri Lanka if his symptoms resolve.”

Meanwhile, senior paceman Brett Lee yesterday questioned Australia’s contentious rotation selection policy after injury to Starc. With Starc out, Lee criti-cised the rotation policy, branding it confusing.

“I believe, and I’m a bit old school, that you’ve got to earn your right to play for Australia,” he told reporters yesterday.

“You don’t want to breed a cul-ture where you’re looking over your shoulder every time -- who’s out this week? Who’s getting rested? Who’s coming in because there are four or five guys waiting to take my spot?.

“On the one hand I think it’s great that everybody’s getting an opportunity.

“But also, if I’m a paying mem-ber of the public, I want to see Australia’s number one side. What is that side? I don’t know, no one knows.” AGENCIES

Tomic wins first ATP title in Sydney

Fresh Federer defends quiet build-upMELBOURNE, Australia: Swiss great Roger Federer warned yesterday he was fresh and eager for more Grand Slam glory as he prepared for his 53rd straight major, defending his quiet start to the year.

The 31-year-old has been playing Grand Slam tennis since 1999 and shows no signs of slowing down, but has altered the way he prepares for the big events and skipped any warm-up tournaments ahead of next week’s Australian Open.

He said it is all part of his plan to keep competing at the elite level for as long as possible and overtake South African Wayne Ferreira’s record of 56 consecu-tive Slams.

“I purposely didn’t play a lead-up tournament so that I’d be fresh for the beginning, hopefully going deep into the tournament. That’s the goal obviously,” he said.

“I think it’s nice sometimes doing it slightly different than every year the same thing. Otherwise it feels like a deja vu and that’s not always a good thing.

“It’s been very relaxing, the last one-and-a-half months,” he added.

“Not many appearances, no press almost. Just focusing on getting ready mentally and physically really.”

Bidding for an 18th Grand Slam title and a fifth at Melbourne, Federer is enjoying the game now as much as he ever has -- even the endless gym work to stay fit enough to compete with the young guns of the tour.

It is not something he used to savour.“Today I take much more pleasure out of doing the gym

work than I ever have,” he said. “Today things for me make sense. I know why I’m doing them. I know they’re

necessary. “I have a lot of experience,” he added. “I’m ready to

go and eager. That to me right now dominates. It’s important to be fresh going into a new season because the last couple years have been tough on tour.”

Federer has indicated he wants to compete at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio, when he will be 35, an age when

most tennis professionals have retired, with longevity a key motivation for him now.

As part of plans to extend his shelf life, he will play fewer tournaments in 2013, focusing on the majors.

“Longevity has always been something that’s been important to me,” he said.

“I’ve planned the season accordingly this year again, that I will not miss the majors because of injury.”

The Ferreira landmark is one he is focused on, with the South African a good friend and inspiration. He used to ball-boy for him when he was young and they played doubles together.

“I hope I can make it, I was thinking back how many times I’ve played already in the main draw of a Slam,” he said of the 56-Slam target.

“It’s been a lot. For many years I also came here for qualifying, back in ‘99, for the juniors ‘98. I go back 15, 16 years already I’ve been coming here every single year.

“I’m excited that I’ve played so many in a row and I hope I can keep the streak alive and see where it stops. We’ll see how it goes.”

Other than Ferreira, only Stefan Edberg has played more straight Grand Slams at 54.

Federer’s key threat to further Grand Slam glory in Melbourne are Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray, but he also warned any of the current top 10 was capable of breaking through.

“Obviously with Rafa (Nadal) not in the draw, that might mean for some of the players they only have to beat one of us, of the top three, maybe none,” he said. AFP

Hewitt wins Kooyong titleMELBOURNE: Lleyton Hewitt showed vintage form as he humbled Juan Martin Del Potro 6-1, 6-4 yesterday to win the Kooyong Classic, giving him a major boost ahead of his first match at the Australian Open.

The former number one and two-time Grand Slam winner a decade ago completed victories over three top-15 opponents at the eight-man special event at the Kooyong Stadium -- the former home of the Open.

Hewitt’s current game belies his 82nd place ranking, with the 31-year-old veteran hopeful of doing major damage as he begins play on Monday against Serb eighth seed Janko Tipsarevic at Melbourne Park.

“Janko is a tough first round -- but there are not too many easy first rounds out there,” said Hewitt. “He’s a quality player who has improved a lot in the past two years.

“It’s nice to know I’ve done all the right preparation, I can just go out there and play,” said the battler who a year ago had the foot surgery that finally cured a lingering problem that had forced him to play in pain.

Hewitt earned his compre-hensive win over number seven Argentine Del Potro in 66 min-utes to duplicate his Kooyong title from 2011.

The Australian raced through the opening set in 27 minutes, reaching a 3-1 lead after just 16 minutes. He finished off the set on a first set point as Del Potro fired a forehand long.

Del Potro made a stab at a rally in the second set, breaking Hewitt for 3-4 at one point and levelling at 4-all soon after.

But Hewitt stayed in control, moving to 5-4 and finishing a game later on a second match point, a stinging forehand return winner. AFP

SYDNEY: Rising Australian star Bernard Tomic clinched his first ATP Tour title with a fighting win over South African Kevin Anderson in the final of the Sydney International yesterday.

Tomic claimed his eighth straight win of the year in down-ing the 36th-ranked Anderson 6-3, 6-7 (2/7), 6-3 in one hour and 55 minutes, setting himself up for the Australian Open, which begins tomorrow, and saying he felt “unstoppable”.

Tomic is the first Australian winner of the Sydney tournament since Lleyton Hewitt in 2005 and the first 20-year-old event winner since Roger Federer in 2002.

“I couldn’t ask for anything more. It’s an amazing feeling,” Tomic said.

“Now that I know what it feels like to win a tournament, and it’s the best feeling in the world.

“I’m so happy I won. I can’t stop here now. Now I’ve got to look to the next tournament and keep playing the tennis I’ve been playing.”

He will head the Australian Open in Melbourne with his rank-ing down to 43 and with a chance of facing the 17-time Grand Slam champion and second seed Federer in the third round.

Tomic begins with a match against Argentina’s Leonardo

Mayer on Tuesday. “I’ve got a good opponent in the first round and I’m playing great tennis. I feel unstoppable. I feel like I’m playing great tennis,” he said.

“When you know that no one can beat you, not even the No.1, you’ve got a good feeling.

“It’s amazing stepping on court. You’re so confident. That’s going to be taken down to Melbourne and I’m going to use that for every match I play there.” Tomic began confidently, breaking Anderson’s

opening service game and holding a break point in the sixth game before wrapping up the set in 28 minutes.

But he encountered stiffer opposition from Anderson in the second set, fighting off a break point on serve in the eighth game before taking it to a tiebreaker, which the South African domi-nated to make it one set all.

Tomic had the Anderson serve under pressure in the third set, breaking in the eighth game on his fourth break point when Anderson double-faulted.

Tomic confidently served out for the match for his first career senior title. It was his second vic-tory over Anderson.

The confident youngster has begun 2013 in blazing style start-ing with three wins in the mixed teams Hopman Cup, including a triumph in Perth over world number one Novak Djokovic.

“I’m really fit and that’s why I feel fine,” Tomic said.

“It’s just amazing what I’ve done the last few months and got my body to where it is and my tennis is improving each day.

“To get all these matches under my belt is a big confidence and this is what you need in this sport.”

Anderson, 26, was the first South African to reach the final of the Sydney International. AFP

Australian edges past Anderson in final

Roger Federer of Switzerland shares a light moment with a ball girl during Kid’s Tennis Day at the Australian Open tennis tournament in Melbourne, yesterday.

Vesnina wins first WTA title in Hobart HOBART, Australia: Russia’s Elena Vesnina won her first WTA title with a 6-3, 6-4 vic-tory over defending champion Mona Barthel in the Hobart International final yesterday.

Vesnina, the world number 68, playing in her seventh final, showed too much fight for the German, whose occasional blaz-ing winners were undone by an erratic service game. Vesnina, who was ranked as high as 22 in 2009, becomes the second Russian to win the Hobart event after Anna Chakvetadze in 2007 and takes home $40,000 in prize money. The 26-year-old Russian defeated seeds Yaroslava Shvedova and Sloane Stephens along with former Australian event cham-pion Jarmila Gajdosova on her way to the final. AFP

Novak Djokovic of Serbia points as he leaves the court with Roger Federer of Switzerland (centre) and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga of France (left) during the Kid’s Tennis Day at the Australian Open tennis tournament in Melbourne, yesterday.

Australia’s Bernard Tomic holds up the winner’s trophy after his win in the final of the International Sydney Tennis tournament yesterday.

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Ferrer wins Auckland title for fourth time

David Ferrer of Spain kisses the winner’s trophy as he celebrates his win over Philipp Kohlschreiber of Germany in the Men’s final at the Auckland ATP tennis tournament in Auckland, yesterday.

AUCKLAND: Top-seed David Ferrer warmed up for the Australian open with a fourth ATP Auckland crown when he recovered from two early service breaks to beat Philipp Kohlschreiber in straight sets yesterday.

It was a confidence-boost-ing finish for Ferrer ahead of the opening Grand Slam of the year in Melbourne as he fought back to win 7-6 (7/5), 6-1 after Kohlschreiber held set point at 4-5 on serve in the first set.

Despite dropping his second and fifth service games, it took Ferrer just 78 minutes to dispose of Kohlschreiber with most of the time spent on the first set which lasted 52 minutes before the Spaniard won the tie break 7-5.

However, while it showed he was tapering nicely for the Australian Open, Ferrer put thoughts of Melbourne aside as he celebrated equalling the record of former 12-time Grand Slam winner Roy Emerson as the only players to win four times in Auckland.

“It was amazing for me to win here for the fourth time. Now I can say this is my favourite tour-nament,” he said.

“But every tournament is dif-ferent and now I want to enjoy this moment because it is very special for me and tomorrow (today) I will go to Melbourne and practise again.”

Once he settled into the game, crucially finding his rhythm when facing set point, Ferrer took full control as he darted around the court retrieving the seemingly impossible.

As his confidence rose, Kohlschreiber’s game fell apart and he was unable to compete with the Spaniard physically or mentally.

Af ter Ferrer broke Kohlschreiber in the 10th game of the first set, he broke him again three times in the second set which included taking the match on a double fault as the German’s usually lethal serve deserted him.

“I had a very good start but it’s very hard to play against David, he never gives up, he gives you all the time one-more shot,” said Kohlschreiber who conceded he needed to take the first set to have any chance of winning.

“I didn’t take the first set and he raised his level and that’s why I think the second set went too fast.”

Ferrer will play Belgian Olivier Rochus in the first round of the Australian Open. AFP

Own goals help Chelsea crush Stoke; Spurs drawAston Villa slip into relegation zone after 1-0 loss; Everton held at home

Stoke City’s Jon Walters (centre) reacts after missing a penalty against Chelsea during their English Premier League match at the Britannia Stadium in Stoke-on-Trent, northern England, yesterday.

LONDON: Jon Walters scored an unfortunate brace of headed own goals and missed a late penalty as Chelsea won 4-0 at Stoke City to reclaim third place in the Premier League yesterday.

Frank Lampard also got on the score-sheet to become Chelsea’s second-highest all-time goal-scorer, as Rafael Benitez’s side bounced back from their 2-0 loss to Swansea City in the first leg of their League Cup semi-final.

Chelsea made the break-through in first-half injury time at the Britannia Stadium when Walters inadvertently put Cesar Azpilicueta’s cross past his own goalkeeper with a bullet header.

Improbably, Walters then diverted a Juan Mata into his own goal to make it 2-0 in the 63rd minute and two minutes later Lampard blasted home his 194th Chelsea goal from the pen-alty spot after Mata went down in the Stoke box.

Stoke had not been beaten at home all season but that record was shattered, with Eden Hazard adding a superb fourth in the 73rd minute with a sweetly struck left-foot shot from 25 yards.

Chelsea fans had even more reason to cheer when captain John Terry came on as a sub-stitute following a two-month

English Premier League Results

Aston Villa 0 Southampton 1

Everton 0 Swansea 0

Fulham 1 Wigan 1

Norwich 0 Newcastle 0

QPR 0 Tottenham 0

Reading 3 West Brom 2

Stoke 0 Chelsea 4

Sunderland 3 West Ham 0

injury lay-off, while Walters blazed a last-minute penalty over the crossbar to compound his misfortune.

Chelsea’s victory took them back into third place, after the previous incumbents of the final podium position, Tottenham Hotspur, were held to a 0-0 draw at Queens Park Rangers.

Spurs striker Jermain Defoe came close to opening the scor-ing in the first half with a 20-yard strike that crashed back off the post, with QPR goalkeeper Julio Cesar reacting brilliantly to save Emmanuel Adebayor’s follow-up.

The hosts’ best chances both fell to Shaun Wright-Phillips, but he could not find the target on either occasion.

Julio Cesar also thwarted Defoe in the second period, while Tottenham full-back Kyle Walker whipped a free-kick inches over the crossbar.

“They defended very well; we wanted to play with a higher tempo, but they frustrate you,” said Tottenham manager Andre Villas-Boas.

“Julio Cesar had a great game. It was a difficult game for us, but we got an away point, so we are satisfied.”

Following the shock 1-0 win at Chelsea in their previous outing, QPR are now five points from safety with 16 games to play.

They remain at the bottom of the table, however, after Reading avoided slipping to the foot of the standings by storming back from two goals down to win 3-2 in extraordinary fashion at home to West Bromwich Albion.

A Romelu Lukaku brace had put the visitors in control, but Reading scored three times in the last eight minutes through Jimmy Kebe, Adam Le Fondre and Pavel Pogrebnyak to give their fight to

avoid relegation a shot in the arm.Aston Villa’s miserable week

continued as they lost 1-0 at home to Southampton to slip into the relegation zone.

Beaten 3-1 by fourth-tier Bradford City in the first leg of their League Cup semi-final on Tuesday, Paul Lambert’s men went down to a 34th-minute Rickie Lambert penalty and have now gone five league games with-out a win.

Wigan Athletic climbed out of the relegation places at Villa’s expense after Franco Di Santo cancelled out Georgios Karagounis’ 25-yard opener to give the Latics a 1-1 draw at Fulham.

A glorious 30-yard drive by Sebastian Larsson set Sunderland on their way to a 3-0 success at home to West Ham United that lifted them further away from the bottom three, with Adam

Johnson and James McClean also on target.

Everton squandered an oppor-tunity to close to within a point of fourth-place Spurs by draw-ing 0-0 at home to Swansea, while Newcastle United’s trip to Norwich City also ended goalless.

The top two are both in action today, with leaders Manchester United hosting Liverpool and second-place Manchester City visiting Arsenal. AFP

Hosts South Africa take control

South Africa (I innings):A Petersen c Patel b Bracewell ...................21G Smith c Watling b Wagner ......................54H Amla c Watling b Boult .........................110J Kallis c Watling b Bracewell .......................8A de Villiers c Williamson b Patel ................51F du Plessis c McCullum b Munro ............137D Elgar (not out) ......................................103R Peterson c Patel b Munro .........................8D Steyn c Patel b Bracewell .........................5R Kleinveldt (not out) ...................................7Extras (B-6, LB-8, NB-3, W-4) ...................21Total (for 8 wkts decl) ..........................525Did not bat: M MorkelFall of wickets: 1-29, 2-121, 3-137, 4-223, 5-336, 6-467, 7-481, 8-508.Bowling: Boult 32-5-108-1 (2w); Bracewell 34-6-94-3 (1w); Wagner 33-4-135-1 (3nb,

1w); Patel 36.5-2-134-1; Munro 18-4-40-2.New Zealand (I innings):M Guptill c Petersen b Steyn ........................1B McCullum c Kallis b Peterson .................13K Williamson c Smith b Steyn.......................4D Brownlie c De Villiers b Kleinveldt ............10D Flynn lbw b Kleinveldt ..............................0B Watling (batting) ....................................15C Munro c Elgar b Peterson .........................0D Bracewell (batting) ...................................3Extras (LB-1) ..............................................1Total (for 6 wkts) ....................................47 Fall of wickets: 1-2, 2-8, 3-27, 4-27, 5-39, 6-39.Bowling: Steyn 8-2-14-2; Morkel 8-4-12-0; Kleinveldt 6-1-18-2; Peterson 2-1-2-2.Match situation: New Zealand trail by 478 runs with four wickets remaining in the first innings.

Scoreboard

PORT ELIZABETH, South Africa: Dale Steyn and Rory Kleinveldt ripped out New Zealand’s top order batsmen as South Africa took control on the second day of the second and final Test at St George’s Park yesterday.

New Zealand were reeling at 47 for six at the close, a massive 478 behind South Africa’s first innings

total of 525 for eight declared, needing another 279 to avoid the follow on.

There were three centurions in the South African innings, with Faf du Plessis (137) and Dean Elgar (103 not out) joining first day hero Hashim Amla, who added only four to his overnight score before being dismissed for 110.

Steyn, bowling his fastest spell of the summer, had Martin Guptill and Kane Williamson caught in the slips in his first three overs.

Then the strongly-built Kleinveldt, who replaced the injured Vernon Philander, pro-duced a snorter of a delivery to have Dean Brownlie caught behind off his gloves. Kleinveldt followed up with a full ball which trapped Daniel Flynn leg before wicket.

New Zealand captain Brendon McCullum survived the pace bowling onslaught, only to suc-cumb to the second ball of spin.

He played a loose drive against left-arm spinner Robin Peterson to be caught at slip for 13, eked out over 98 minutes and 61 balls.

New Zealand’s woes continued when debutant Colin Munro was out first ball, caught at short leg off Peterson.

New Zealand were 39 for six and in danger of being dismissed for fewer than the disastrous 45 all out which doomed them to an innings defeat in the first Test in Cape Town.

But that humiliation was

avoided when BJ Watling cut Steyn for four in the last over of the day.

South Africa were made to struggle for runs early, adding only 65 runs in 29 overs before lunch.

Du Plessis and Elgar played through the difficult period and lifted the tempo during the afternoon.

The pair shared a sixth wicket stand of 131, a record for South Africa against New Zealand as the home side added 105 runs between lunch and tea.

Du Plessis, stuck on 99 at lunch, reached his century when he hit the first ball he received after the interval, from off-spinner Jeetan Patel, for six.

The left-handed Elgar played some fine attacking shots, par-ticularly against off-spinner Jeetan Patel, and hit left-arm pace bowler Neil Wagner for a soaring six over long-on as he attempted to reach his maiden century before tea.

He was on 91 at tea and the declaration was delayed until he reached his hundred in the sixth over after the break. AFP

ICC gives support to PakistanLAHORE, Pakistan: Cricket’s governing body will continue to support Pakistan in its efforts to bring back the international game, but much depends on the secu-rity situation, an official said yesterday.

International cricket has been suspended in Pakistan since terrorists attacked the Sri Lankan team bus in 2009, leaving eight people dead and seven visiting players wounded.

David Richardson, chief executive of the International Cricket Council (ICC) said Pakistan will continue to be supported.

“The ICC views Pakistan as a very important part of inter-national cricket,” Richardson told a media briefing in Lahore.

“It’s our role to support Pakistan in its efforts to make sure that international cricket returns to the country,” he said.

AFP

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