By Yuram Abdullah WeilerAnalyst and journalist

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W W W . T E H R A N T I M E S . C O M I N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L Y

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Poison gas and the Holocaust: Spicer crosses a Zionist redline

During a White House presser on April 11, 2017, a revealing question and answer exchange

took place between members of the White House press corps and Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer. Several probing questions on the U.S. attack on Syria had been asked by mem-bers of the press corps and Spicer ’s replies all centered around Russia’s backing the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whom he tried to compare to the Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler.

In response to one question on whether Trump still felt that Putin was “smart,” given charges by U.S officials of Russian complicity in the alleged chemical attack on Khan Sheikhun, Spicer stated that “Russia is isolated. They have aligned themselves with North Korea, Syria, Iran. ... With the exception of Russia, they are all failed states.” Predictably, there was no out-cry in the U.S. for the asinine allegation that the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has the fastest scientific growth rate in the world, was a “failed state.”

Another reporter, after pointing to the strong alliance between Russia and Syria, asked Spicer to explain why he thought Putin might pull back his sup-port for President Assad at this point. Referring to the U.S., Spicer stated that “we didn’t use chemical weapons in World War II.” Of course, the U.S. and the U.K. both had plans to use chemical weapons, and, in fact, the U.S. had even shipped 60 tons of mustard gas bombs on the merchant ship John Harvey to the Italian port of Bari. When the Ger-man Luftwaffe attacked on December 2, 1943, the cargo detonated dispersing mustard gas and killing over a thousand. This could be similar to what happened in Syria at Khan Sheikhun, where insur-gents reportedly were storing chemical munitions. 1 3

ISIL ‘grand mufti’ slain in Iraqi army missile strikesThe highest so-called official of reli-gious law of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/Daesh) terrorist group has been killed in a missile at-tack carried out by the Iraqi Air Force military aircraft in Mosul as govern-ment forces, backed by allied fighters from Popular Mobilization Units (Al-Hashd Al-Sha’abi), are battling to re-take the country’s second largest city from the terrorists.

Commander of Federal Police Forc-es Lieutenant General Raed Shaker Jawdat said on Friday that Abdullah Younis al-Badrani, better known by the nom de guerre Abu Ayoub al-Attar, and two of his close aides were killed as security forces lobbed a barrage of missiles at a militant position in west-ern Mosul.

Jawdat identified one of the slain aides as Abdulqader Mahmoud al-Hamdouni al-Saji, noting that he was a member of the so-called ISIL oversight council for militant bases.

The high-ranking Iraqi security of-ficial further noted that federal police forces had fired a number of missiles into ISIL General Security Directorate building, and destroyed it.

Iraqi forces also destroyed an an-ti-aircraft gun belonging to ISIL Takfiris as they struck militant-held al-Zanjili school in the western flank of Mosul.

The developments came a day af-ter commander of Nineveh Liberation Operation, Lieutenant General Abdul Amir Yarallah, announced that soldiers from the 9th Armored Division had reclaimed the village of Halila and es-tablished control over an entrance into western Mosul.

The media bureau of the Iraqi Joint Operations Command (JOC) also stat-ed that Iraqi government forces had retaken the villages of Shawitah, Tal al-Asfour and al-Sabouniyah from ISIL terrorists.

The statement added that Iraqi forc-es hoisted the national flag over several buildings in the liberated villages.

Meanwhile, members of the Coun-ter Terrorism Service (CTS) could free Mosul’s western neighborhood of al-Abar after inflicting heavy losses on ISIL ranks and destroying their military hardware. 1 3

South Pars deal with Total to be finalized within days:

NIOCTEHRAN — The National Iranian Oil

Company will soon finalize an agree-ment with France’s Total on the de-velopment of South Pars gas field’s phase 11.

The agreement will be finalized by the end of Farvardin - the current Iranian calendar month ending April 20, ISNA quoted NIOC Managing Director Ali Kardor as saying on Sat-urday.

“The [French] company has already allocated $15 million to this project in accordance with the first phase of the contract,” the official said.

In February, Reuters quoted Pat-rick Pouyanné the chairman and CEO of Total as saying that Total aimed to make a final investment decision on the $2 billion project by the summer, but the decision hinges on the renewal of U.S. sanctions waivers.

Referring to the comments by To-tal’s chief executive, the NIOC head said that Total has not declared any conformance to the U.S. positions to-ward Iran.

The South Pars phase 11 project aims to produce 1.8 billion cubic feet a day of gas, equivalent to 370,000 bar-rels of oil. The produced gas will be fed into Iran’s gas network.

Several high-profile politicians announce candidacy

TEHRAN — The time for registration

for the upcoming presidential election ended Saturday at 18:00 local time, with several high-profile politicians registering to run for president in the May election.

Incumbent President Hassan Rou-hani registered on Friday to seek a re-election following a 4-year term during which he tried to deliver what he had promised back in 2013.

Rouhani’s main contestant, as many observers believe, will be Ebrahim Raisi, who has been supported by the Popular Front of Islamic Revolution Forces, a po-litical coalition that was founded in late 2016 and pledged to introduce a sin-gle candidate to challenge the self-de-scribed moderate president, who has been supported by reformists.

On Wednesday, former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad registered. Ahmadinejad’s decision to run was a surprise since he had been advised by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khame-nei not to run.

The former president also intro-duced a close ally, Hamid Baghaei, who served as the head of Iran’s Cul-tural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tour-ism Organization during Ahmadine-jad’s first presidential term. 2

16 Pages Price 10,000 Rials 38th year No.12805 Sunday APRIL 16, 2017APRIL 16, 2017 Farvardin 27, 1396 Rajab 18, 1438

Intl. tourists aboard Golden Eagle visit World Heritage sites in Iran

Persepolis crowned Iran Professional League champion

Iran, Pakistan ink MOU on banking co-op

Book City Institute to host meeting on Sadi, Hugo 1610 154

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Armenia’s President Serzh Sargsyan de-scribed Iran’s cooperation with Eurasian Eco-nomic Union (EAEU) necessary for mutual ties between Tehran-Yerevan and beneficial to the expansion goals of the regional body.

The Armenia’s president in the Supreme Eura-sian Economic Council said that the soaring trend of business exchanges between the country and the other EAEU members is going on.

Pointing to the importance of the EAEU’s cooperation expansion with non-member countries, Sargsyan added that the cooper-ation with Iran, China, India, Egypt and some other countries were discussed in 2016.

He said that Armenia is interested in im-

plementing agreements, especially with Iran, which shares friendly, helpful and satisfactory mutual ties.

The Eurasian Economic Comission’s head Tigran Sargsyan also reported he cooper-ation plan between the Union and some countries, including Iran, China, Singapore and Egypt.

Russia’s Frist Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said: signing the agreement of es-tablishing free trade zone between Iran and EAEU is in the final phase of examining it by member states.

Earlier, Armenian’s Deputy Prime Minister Vache Gabrielian had called for the imple-

mentation of the economic cooperation plan between Islamic Republic of Iran and EAEU, the agreement of which has been verified, as a necessary step and stressed his country’s readiness for continuing talks on the plan.

He said that Armenia can play the role of guide in the talks between Iran and EAEU.

Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Kirgizstan Prime Ministers approved the plan of agreement with Iran to establish free trade zone on March 6. The agreement involves numerous economic opportunities, including trade and investment, and is considered as the prelude to more cooperation.

(Source: IRNA)

Iran joined a number of regional countries in Russia for a new round of International Afghanistan Peace Conference to find dip-lomatic ways out of the problems that have plagued Afghanistan for years, Tasnim re-ported on Saturday.

Delivering a speech to the conference, held in Moscow on Friday, Iran’s Deputy For-eign Minister for Asia and Pacific Affairs Ebra-him Rahimpour voiced Tehran’s stances on the situation in neighboring Afghanistan.

Iran has been hosting around three mil-lion Afghan refugees during the past years, Rahimpour noted, voicing Tehran’s readiness to cooperate with the Kabul government for the establishment of peace in Afghanistan and for the settlement of local and regional problems, including drug trafficking and se-curity issues.

The regional countries should express determination to fight against terrorism as a clear message for the terrorist groups, the

Iranian diplomat added.It was the third regional meeting on Af-

ghanistan in five months.In December 2016, Russia played host to

a trilateral meeting with China and Pakistan.Earlier in March, the Russian Foreign Min-

istry had announced that at least 12 coun-tries, including the US, had been invited to the Moscow conference.

The US, however, turned down the invi-tation and refused to attend the conference.

Armenian president: Iran-EAEU cooperation necessary

Flash flood, landslide leaves 35 dead, 8 missing

Iran attends Afghanistan peace conference in Moscow

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Rouhani: No one’s permission to build missile

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TEHRAN —

Severe flood and landslide in western and northwestern parts of Iran

have so far claimed 35 lives and left 8 missing.

Heavy rain which started on Friday morning caused flood

in the afternoon and unfortu-nately the northwestern cities of Azarshahr and Ajabshir hit the hardest by the flood, ISNA

quoted Ismail Najjar, head of the Crisis Management Organ-ization as saying on Saturday.

Seven cars have gone missing in Azarshahr, he regretted, adding, despite the warnings some people were reluctant to leave the area.

According to East Azarbaijan crisis management organization up to now, 14 have died and at least 3 gone missing in Azarshahr and some 4 individuals are miss-ing and 15 are dead n Ajabshir.

“Some bridges are reported-ly damaged in West Azarbaijan province and sadly a 12-year-old boy is taken away by the flood while biking,” he explained.

Moreover, 4 died in a landslide triggered by the flood in Saqqez, Kordestan province, and one passed away in Baneh, he said.

So far, some 1,100 have re-ceived relief services, 77 pro-vided with emergency accom-modation, and 6 transferred to hospitals in 32 cities and villages, Najjar noted, adding, water was pumped out of 48 houses as well.

By Ali Kushki

APRIL 16, 2017APRIL 16, 2017

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Iran unveils its own training jet

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Over 1.15 million engaged in works related to presidential election

TEHRAN —This year about 1,150,000 people are engaged in executive af-

fairs related to the presidential election, a member of the central team of presidential election said on Saturday.

Kazem Mirvalad told the IRIB that the central team is made up of 11 people, 4 of which are legal entities and 7 are real.

These people will oversee the casting of votes and after that they will count them and refer them to the central team for verification, Mirvalad explained.

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Jalili, Bazrpash do not register for presidential polls

TEHRAN — Saeed Jalili and Mehrdad Bazrpash, two conservative hopes of

the May 19 presidential election, did not register their name for candidacy.

Bazrpash, a member of the Popular Front of Revolution Forces and former member of Majlis presiding board, said he would not register in favor of the front’s candidates, Fars reported on Saturday.

Jalili, former nuclear negotiator, left expectations unanswered and rumors about his intention to run ended after he did not appear at the Interior Ministry by the closing time of the registration.

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Rouhani to be backed with 1 or 2 substitute candidates

TEHRAN — Hassan Rouhani will be backed with one or two substitutes

from the reform wing during the upcoming presidential election, according to a member of the Supreme Council of Reformists.

Speaking to Mehr news agency in an interview published on Saturday, Mohsen Mehralizadeh said the presence of the substitutes will “surely be coordinated with Mr. Rouhani.”

He did not mention the names of the substitutes, saying no final decision has yet been made in this regard.

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Reformists meet with Rouhani over presidential campaign

TEHRAN — A number of reformist figures met with President Hassan

Rouhani on Saturday morning to know about his views about presidential race, Tasnim reported, without giving their names.

Quoting an anonymous source from the reformists, the news agency said they “expressed worry over the odds that Rouhani fails to get votes and stressed the necessity that alternative candidates run by Rouhani’s side.”

Later, one of their suggested substitutes, First Vice President Es’haq Jahangiri, registered his name for presidency.

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Worries rise over increasing number of presidential candidates

TEHRAN — Worries are rising over the large number of people who have

registered for Iran’s presidential race this year.Ali Asqar Yusefnejad, a member of the Majlis presid-

ing board, expressed pity over the situation, calling on the lawmakers to think a mechanism to prevent such oc-currences in the future, ISNA reported on Saturday.

Also, Iran’s Ambassador to London Hamid Baidinejad wrote on Instagram that “It does not seem the present way of registering candidates befits the global prestige of our country.”

P O L I T I C Sd e s k

Rafsanjani’s brother registers for candidacy

TEHRAN — Mohammad Hashemi, brother to the late ayatollah Akbar

Hashemi Rafsanjani, on Saturday registered his name for candidacy in the May presidential election.

“I decided to register to allay some worries,” he told IRNA after registration.

He added, “Friends suggested I run in order to pursue the ideals and thoughts of the late Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, namely to promote the Islamic Iran and improve people’s esteem, comfort, and welfare.”

Hashemi added that he will run as an independent candidate.

TEHRAN — Iran unveiled its first sophis-ticated training jet on Saturday, saying it will soon joins the country’s air force.

The all-new single-seat, twin engine “Qaher F-313” [Dominant F-313], can land at short airstrips, has a low radar cross sec-tion that would allow an aircraft to remain effectively invisible to radars, is equipped with additional fuel tanks and internal bomb bays, Defense Minister Brigadier General Hossien Dehghan explained.

Also, the fully indigenous aircraft can fly at low altitude, carry weapons, and accomplish close air support and reconnaissance missions, as well.

An initial version of the fighter had already been displayed in 2013.

The Islamic republic launched a self-sufficient military program in the 1980s to compensate for a Western weapons embargo that banned export of military technology and equipment to Iran.

Since 1992, Iran has produced its own tanks, armored personnel carriers, missiles, torpedoes, drones and fighter planes.

The Qaher is one of several aircraft designs the Iranian military has rolled out since 2007.

In 2007, Iran unveiled what it said was its first domestically manufactured fight-er jet, called Azarakhsh or Lightning. In the same year, it said that Azarakhsh had reached industrial production stage.

Saeqeh, or Thunder, was a follow-up aircraft derived from Azarakhsh. Iran unveiled its first squadron of Saeqeh fighter bombers in an air show in

September 2010.Mohajer-6 tactical drone and Fakour

missile, the country’s first air-to-air one, were among other items rolled out.

Dehghan put Mahajer-6 on par with pioneering drones used by superpowers, saying the unmanned aerial vehicle is optimal for reconnaissance and combat operations.

Iran says it stands among the first four world states in developing drones.

In October 2016, it displayed one of its latest drone products, Saeqeh (Thunderbolt), the Iranian version of the RQ-170 drone manufactured through reverse engineering of the U.S. drone, which was tracked and hunted down in Iran late in 2011.

TEHRAN — Iran’s Foreign Ministry

submitted its 5th quarterly report on the implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, commonly called the nuclear deal, to parliament on Saturday.

The report includes the latest developments in nuclear activities and removal of sanctions and obstacles and challenges.

Iran and the 5+1 group - the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia plus Germany - finalized the text of

the JCPOA in Vienna in July 2015. The nuclear agreement went into effect in January 2016.

The National Security and Foreign Policy Committee of the parliament is tasked with monitoring “the proper implementation” of the JCPOA.

Director of the International Atomic Energy Agency reiterated in January 2017 that Iran has fulfilled all its obligations under the nuclear accord according to which is tasked to limit its nuclear activities in exchange for termination of financial and economic sanctions.

TEHRAN — Sanctions imposed on Iran over its nuclear program dealt a

major blow to the country’s economic transparency, an issue much neglected in assessing the outcomes of the 2015 international nuclear deal, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Saturday.

“Sanctions and the way they were addressed by the previous administration… ruined fiscal discipline and transparency in Iran’s economy,” Zarif was quoted as saying in an address to an international event on exchange, bank and insurance in Tehran.

Zarif’s remarks were a reference to two consecutive administrations (2005-2013) of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, when sanctions against

the country over its nuclear program escalated. In 2007, Ahmadinejad dismissed any new UN

sanctions resolution as “a torn piece of paper” that would not stop Tehran’s nuclear work.

Ahmadinejad’s defiant rhetoric and bad governance pushed Iran towards international isolation and cost the country seven UN resolutions.

Mounting pressures on Tehran during the sanctions era created a black market for imports of basic goods and transfer of oil revenues into the country.

Zarif hinted at a rig going missing during the Ahmadinejad administration as an instance of irregularities at the sanctions time.

In 2011, sanctions made it difficult for Tehran to rent oil drilling rigs, so the Iranian Offshore Engineering and Construction Company spent $87 million to buy an oil drilling rig that was never delivered, called “the case of the missing rig” in newspaper headlines.

However, the situation has changed at the wake of the nuclear deal with global powers that removed sanctions against the country, paving the way for Tehran to re-engage with the global community.

Iran could attract $12 billion foreign investment in the past Iranian calendar year of 1395 (which ended on March 20) as the result of the positive environment created in post-sanctions era.

Foreign Ministry submits 5th report on JCPOA to parliament

Zarif: Sanctions impaired Iran’s economic transparency

ELECTION COUNTDOWN

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TEHRAN — Iranian President Hassan

Rouhani said on Saturday that Iran needs no one’s permission to build missile and planes.

During a ceremony held to unveil the Defense Ministry’s achievements, he said that Iran has never sought to attack any country, however peace is not a “one-way road”.

“Iran has never intended any aggression and will not; however, peace is not a one-way road and therefore we should always be vigilant,” the president asserted.

He added, “Maintaining regional balance and preemptive power is essential for a country like Iran which

has endangered interests of major powers and sent message of justice and freedom to the world.”

Rouhani, a former top security official, also said that major powers have always sought their interests in the Middle East region and have undermined regional security and stability.

The president went on to say that strengthening the armed forces is just for defensive objectives.

Rouhani also highlighted the importance of resistance.

“We should always be ready especially because of the fact that we have been under military, political and economic attacks after the revolution,” he said.

Rouhani: Iran needs no one’s permission to build missile

TEHRAN — Mexican President Enrique

Pena Nieto has said that Mexico is willing to expand ties with Iran in various areas, especially in economic and cultural spheres.

During a meeting with Mohammad Taghi Hosseini, the Iranian ambassador to Mexico, Pena Nieto called Iran a “great country” that plays important role at the international arena.

He also said that Mexico has started making reforms in energy and economic spheres.

For his part, Hosseini expressed satisfaction over the growing relations between the two countries.

Ambassador Hosseini also said Tehran attaches great importance to cooperation between Iran and Mexico in order to stabilize the oil market.

He added the two countries can play an effective role in settling various international problems.

Iran and Mexico have established close cooperation in various areas and the relations have entered new chapter after a trip by Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif to Mexico City in September 2016.

Iran has been trying to establish good relationship with certain countries on the American continent including Mexico and Brazil.

President Pena Nieto: Mexico willing to expand ties with Iran

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1 Ahmadinejad has been widely criticized by both reformist and principlist camps on a number of issues. Even his former cultural advisor, Mehdi Kalhor, has said he had distanced himself from the former president. Kalhor, who announced his candidacy on Friday, said: “I took a separate path from that of Ahmadinejad in the year 89 (2010) and I’m not his candidate.”

Seyyed Mostafa Mir-Salim, a conservative candidate who served as the minister of culture and Islamic guidance under Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s administration, registered on Tuesday for the May 19 vote.

Tehran’s Mayor, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, and the incumbent Vice President Es’haq Jahangiri also registered at the last hour of registration time on Saturday. Ghalibaf was Rouhani’s main contestant in 2013 election and

received some 6 million votes.Other prominent politicians who announced

their candidacy include: Masoud Zaribafan, a former

vice president under former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; Seyyed Mostafa Hashemitaba, a former vice president in Rafsanjani’s second presidential term and Khatami’s first term; Seyyed Mohammad Gharazi, a former minister of post, telegraph and telephone under Mir Hossein Mousavi and Hashemi Rafsanjani; Hassan Norouzi, a former member of the parliament; Mohsen Gharavian, a teacher at the center of seminary studies in the holy city of Qom; Mostafa Kavakebian, a member of the parliament and the head of Mardomsalari Party; and Alireza Zakani, a former member of the Parliament.

The Interior Ministry announced that 1636 people, including 1499 men and 137 women, registered to run for presidency. The great majority of those who announced their candidacy are ordinary people.

Several high-profile politicians announce candidacy

Ambassador Hosseini (L) meets President Enrique Pena Nieto

Turkey is heading toward a historic ref-erendum on a new political system that could change the course of its history - and it has the country divided right down the middle.

For supporters, change will bring much-needed stability. Others fear it could lead Turkey down the path of an autocratic, one-man rule by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Voters will decide on Sunday whether to approve constitutional changes that would replace the parliamentary system with a presidential one, scrapping the office of the prime minister and handing over its powers to the president.

Erdogan, who has fronted the cam-paign for a “yes” vote, says the proposed “Turkish-style” presidential system will banish weak governments, establish an efficient state and bring prosperity to the country.

A “yes” vote would allow 18 consti-tutional reforms that grant the president the power to appoint government min-isters and senior officials, appoint half of the members in the country’s highest ju-dicial body, declare states of emergency and issue decrees.

Critics argue that will allow Erdogan - who has been in power either as prime minister or president since 2003 - to rule at least until 2029 with few checks and balances in a system where the separa-tion of powers will be less clear-cut.

Polls suggest a neck-and-neck race for Sunday’s vote.

The referendum comes amid troubled times for Turkey, which has been plagued by a string of bombings, renewed vio-lence between the government forces and Kurdish rebels and a failed coup at-tempt in July that resulted in a state of emergency that remains in place.

The emergency powers have permit-ted a widespread government crackdown that has targeted the followers of the United States-based Muslim cleric Fethul-lah Gulen - whom Turkey blames for the coup - and other government opponents. Some 100,000 people - including judges and teachers - have been dismissed, and more than 40,000 people, including jour-nalists and opposition pro-Kurdish legis-lators, have been arrested. Hundreds of news outlets and non-governmental or-ganizations have been shut down.

Gulen denies any ties to the coup at-tempt.

The country is also dealing with the war in neighboring Syria, which led to an influx of some 3 million refugees. Turkey has sent troops into Syria to help oppo-

sition Syrian forces clear a border area from the threat posed by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/Daesh) terror-ist group.

Meanwhile, Turkey is drifting further apart from Europe, following Erdogan’s recent outbursts slamming the govern-ments in the Netherlands and Germany as “Nazis” over their restrictions on Turk-ish ministers’ attempts to court Turkish expatriate votes.

For Erdogan, 63, a presidential system has been a long-time dream.

A prime minister for 11 years since 2003, he was elected president in 2014 for a five-year term and took a far more active role in politics than his predeces-sors, ruling behind the scenes despite the current constitution that requires him to be neutral.

Erdogan argues that as Turkey’s first president to be directly elected by the people - instead of the parliament - he has a wider mandate than previous pres-idents.

If approved, the changes would in ef-fect legalize his de facto rule.

The amendments were approved by parliament in January, but fell short of the majority required to directly come into ef-fect without a national vote.

Erdogan remains popular in Turkey’s conservative and religious heartlands, where he is seen as a strong leader who stands up against Europe, terror threats and coup-plotters. Many believe he has improved services and health care, and given a voice to pious Muslims who at times felt marginalized by more secular governments.

He has crisscrossed the country to hold mass rallies and led an often abra-sive and divisive campaign, accusing his opponents of siding with “terrorists.”

In rally after rally, he has argued that the new system will end periods of un-stable governments and coalitions, pre-vent coups similar to last summer’s failed attempt, and stop the system of dual leadership between the prime and the president.

“If only we could have instituted these changes years ago,” he said during a campaign speech. “We have paid dearly for these delays.”

The opposition has complained about an unfair campaign process, with Erdo-gan and the “yes” propaganda dominat-ing air waves and billboards using state resources. The main opposition party has recorded more than 100 incidents of obstruction to their campaign efforts,

including threats, beatings and arbitrary detentions.

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which will be observing the referendum, noted in a report that the vote is taking place under the state of emergency under which “fun-damental freedoms have been curtailed and thousands of citizens have been de-tained or dismissed, including civil serv-ants, judges, journalists and opposition party members.”

It also noted that supporters of the “no” campaign have faced “bans, police interventions, and violent scuffles at their events.”

Erdogan lashed out at the OSCE re-port in a campaign speech on Friday in the central city of Konya.

“They said that if there is a ‘yes’ vote, it would mean there are problems here. Who are you? First, know your place,” Er-dogan said. “You cannot meddle in what happens if ‘yes’ wins or if ‘no’ wins. So they say they saw ‘yes’ everywhere and did not see ‘no.’ Talk about that with the party representatives who did not work.”

If approved in the referendum, the changes take effect with the next general elections slated for 2019.

(Source: AP)

The German government has approved more arms sales to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which is assisting the House of Saud regime in its deadly mil-itary campaign against Yemen.

German media reported that Berlin had approved the sale of 203,448 det-onators for 40-mm mortar shells to the Arab kingdom as well as 134 million dollars worth of armor-plating for mil-itary vehicles.

The move indicated that Germany was continuing its policy of supplying arms to countries directly involved in the Middle East conflicts and disregard-

ing the vetting process of the deal for potential humanitarian impact.

“Once again, the government is waving through the delivery of military equipment to a war participant in the Persian Gulf region,” said Agnieszka Brugger, the opposition Green Party spokeswoman.

“Instead of finally stopping all arms dealing with the states participating in the bloody war in Yemen, the CDU and SPD [Germany’s governing coalition parties] are ignoring Germany’s arms export guidelines once again,” she add-ed.

Abu Dhabi is a member of the Sau-di regime-led military coalition that has been engaged in a brutal offensive against in Yemen since March 2015 with the aim of reinstalling the former Ri-yadh-allied government.

The deal comes as some seven mil-lion Yemenis are facing starvation as a result of the two-year conflict in the country, which has already claimed over 12,000 civilian lives and taken a heavy toll on the impoverished country’s facil-ities and infrastructure, including hospi-tals, schools and factories.

Germany is one of the world’s main

arms exporters to the European Union states and NATO (North Atlantic Trea-ty Organization) countries. The United States and the United Kingdom have also been major suppliers of arms and weapons to countries that wreak havoc in the Middle East.

The United States and its allies have been under pressure to halt arms sales to the House of Saud regime which faces massive criticism from the inter-national community for launching a vi-olent war against the poorest Arabian Peninsula state.

(Source: Press TV)

European Union lawmakers could sum-mon French far-right presidential candi-date Marine Le Pen to discuss the lifting of her immunity over the alleged misuse of EU money, before the second round of the French election, an influential leg-islator said on Saturday.

French judges have asked the Eu-ropean parliament to lift the immunity of the National Front leader, who is a member of the EU legislature, to per-mit further investigations over alleged misuse of funds to pay for party as-sistants.

“The legal affairs committee has agreed that Le Pen will be summoned for a hearing on the first possible date in May,” Laura Ferrara, the deputy chair of the committee, told Reuters.

She said the hearing could take place in the first week of May, before the May 7 runoff in the French election, which polls show Le Pen is likely to reach.

Le Pen has denounced legal proceed-ings against her as political interference.

Opinion polls have put Le Pen in first

or second place in the first round of vot-ing on April 23, although her three main rivals are now close enough for any two of the four to go through to the runoff.

Polls show Le Pen is not likely to win

the runoff.Ferrara, who is a member of the Ital-

ian Eurosceptic 5 Star Movement, said that Le Pen may decide not to appear before the parliamentary committee.

The European parliament has al-ready sanctioned Le Pen for misusing EU funds. Since February her monthly salary as EU lawmaker has been cut by half to around 3,000 euros ($1 = 0.9426 euros) and other allowances have been with-drawn. The French investigation is aimed at establishing whether other sanctions are warranted.

The EU legislature lifted Le Pen’s immunity in March to allow a separate French investigation over her posting of pictures of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/Daesh) terrorist group violence on social media, an offence that in France can carry a penalty of three years in prison and a fine of 75,000 eu-ros ($79,567).

Before deciding to lift the immunity of a lawmaker, the EU parliament’s legal af-fairs committee usually arranges a hear-ing with the accused legislator. The ac-tual decision follows a few months later.

In the majority of cases, the immunity has been lifted.

(Source: Reuters)

APRIL 16, 2017APRIL 16, 2017 INTERNATIONALI N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L Y

Stability or autocracy? Turkey divided over key referendum

Blast hits Syrian bus convoy near AleppoAn explosion near a bus convoy waiting to enter the Syrian city of Aleppo killed or wounded several people on Saturday, pro-government media outlets, pro-oppo-sition activists reported.

The blast hit the Rashidin area on Aleppo’s outskirts, where dozens of buses carrying mostly Shia residents of two villages that are being evacuated in a deal between warring sides were waiting to enter the city.

Syrian state TV said an unknown number of people had been killed and wounded.

The British-based solo-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported casualties, saying the explosion appeared to be caused by a bomb.

Bomb attack kills 10, injures several in Syr-

ia’s Latakia

Elsewhere, nearly a dozen people have lost their lives and several others sustained injuries when a mas-sive bomb explosion targeted a military camp in Syria’s western coastal province of Latakia.

Local sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a car rigged with explosives was detonated by re-mote control in Salma village, which lies northeast of the provincial capital city of Latakia, on Saturday after-noon.

No militant group or individual has claimed responsi-bility for the attack yet, but such assaults bear the hall-marks of those carried out by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/Daesh) Takfiri terrorists.

Syria’s territorial sovereignty must be re-

spected: Algeria

Meantime, reacting to a recent United States mis-sile strike on a Syrian airbase, Algerian Foreign Minister Ramtane Lamamra has stressed that Syria’s territorial sovereignty must be respected.

Speaking in Algiers, Lamamra urged “respect for the international legality and the sovereignty of the Syrian state.”

He also said that the conflict in Syria had to be re-solved politically. He said “the use of violence will just complicate the situation in this country and torpedo diplomatic efforts.”

The comments came one week after the U.S. war-ships in the eastern Mediterranean launched a barrage of 59 Tomahawk missiles against Shayrat airfield in Syr-ia’s Homs Province.

Lamamra, the Algerian foreign minister, further high-lighted “the need for negotiations between all parties except terrorist groups” to find a solution to the conflict in Syria.

Washington claimed that the airbase had been used to conduct what it said was a chemical attack on the town of Khan Shaykhun in Syria’s Idlib Province on April 4. At least 87 people were killed in the town on that day.

While the opponents of the Syrian government claimed that the deaths were the result of a government chemical attack, Damascus denied any such attack; it said the casualties were caused when a conventional Syrian airstrike hit a depot where militants stored chem-ical weapons.

Syria gave up its entire arsenal of chemical arms un-der a deal between the U.S. and Russia in 2013. On Jan-uary 16, 2017, Former U.S. President Barack Obama’s ex-national security adviser, Susan Rice, said that Syria had “voluntarily and verifiably” given up its chemical weapons stockpile.

Syria has said the U.S. raid on its airbase violated all international laws and showed that Washington was an “accomplice” to the terrorist outfits active in the Middle Eastern state. The U.S. strike was carried out without a United Nations Security Council mandate. And the U.S. Congress’ approval was not sought, either.

Russia ‘skeptical’ of OPCW probe in Syria

Meanwhile, a Russian deputy foreign minister has said Moscow is “skeptical” of the work being carried out by an international organization to probe an alleged chemical attack in Syria, saying Iran, Brazil, and India should be included in any investigation of the purport-ed attack.

A fact-finding mission has been set up by the Organi-zation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and has been sent to Syria to interview survivors and gather bio-metric samples from the site of the alleged chemical attack on April 4.

At least 86 people died in the town of Khan Shaykhun in Syria in the incident. The opponents of the Syrian government say it was a chemical attack conducted by Damascus. The Syrian government denies the ac-cusation, saying that a chemical weapons depot held by militants opposed to the government had been hit in a conventional Syrian airstrike, causing the leak of the chemicals and the deaths. Russia has confirmed that account.

Referring to the OPCW mission, Russian Deputy For-eign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said that, “Moscow be-lieves that the conclusions formulated by the fact-find-ing mission in Syria are politically motivated, biased and requiring further clarification.”

“We are very skeptical over the way they have worked,” he said.

“The trust for their activity continues to dwindle as they ignore obvious facts,” the Russian deputy foreign minister said. “They later impose these conclusions on the entire international community as the ultimate truth.”

“The mission should include representatives of those countries that can objectively assess the situation rath-er than follow the guidelines dictated by their govern-ments,” the Russian deputy foreign minister added.

The OPCW mission sent to Syria is headed by Ahmeet Uzumcu, a national of Turkey, whose government is ve-hemently opposed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Ryabkov said that all permanent United Nations Se-curity Council members should be included in the inter-national watchdog’s probe, too.

(Source: agencies)

Germany sells more arms to UAE amid Yemen war

EU Parliament could summon Le Pen over funds before French presidential runoff vote

4I N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L Y

E C O N O M Y APRIL 16, 2017APRIL 16, 2017

TEHRAN — Foreign investment in the Ira-

nian capital market has witnessed a sharp rise since President Hassan Rou-hani took office in August 2013, IRNA quoted Finance and Economic Affairs Minister Ali Tayyebnia as saying.

Foreign investment in the Iranian capital market stood at 870 billion ri-als (about $23.1 million) in the be-ginning of President Rouhani’s tenure

while the figure hit 12.53 trillion rilas (about $333.1 million) in the past Irani-an calendar year 1395, which ended on March 21, 2017, showing 1,328 percent increase, he explained.

Tayyebnia made the remarks ad-dressing the 10th edition of the Interna-tional Exhibition of Exchange, Bank and Insurance (FINEX 2017) at the Tehran Permanent International Fairgrounds on Saturday.

As reported, Foreign Minister Mo-hammad-Javad Zarif, Central Bank Governor Valiollah Seif and a number

of other officials attended the first day of FINEX 2017, which will last for four days.

Foreign investment in Iran’s capital market surged under Rouhani

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Iran, Pakistan ink MOU on banking co-op

U.S. Treasury has Switzerland in its sightsSwitzerland was again included among the countries singled out by the U.S. Treasury for the value of their currencies and exports.

That could make life more complicated for the Swiss Na-tional Bank, which has used foreign exchange interventions for the better part of a decade to counter an overvalued cur-rency that risked tipping the economy into a recession.

The U.S. department is required by law to report to Con-gress twice a year on whether its major trading partners are gaming their currencies. The latest report was issued Friday. Given its interventions and trade surplus, Switzerland got added to the watch list last year, and any country deemed to be engaging in unfair practices could face penalties.

The SNB has intermittently used foreign exchange inter-ventions to take appreciation pressure off the franc, causing its holdings of foreign currency to spiral to nearly 700 billion francs ($696 billion). It spent 67 billion francs on interventions last year -- uncharacteristically admitting to them following the Brexit vote -- and there’s evidence that it may have been active in markets this year as well.

According to President Thomas Jordan, the SNB is only trying to limit the strength of the currency and isn’t pushing it down to artificially low levels. “The monetary policy of the central bank isn’t one of competitive devaluation,” Jordan said in Baden-Baden, Germany, on March 18.

Representatives for the SNB weren’t immediately available for comment outside regular business hours. A spokeswom-an for the Swiss Finance Ministry said she didn’t expect the list to have any immediate consequences for Switzerland.

As the U.S. Treasury noted in its October 2016 report, Switzerland has only a small sovereign bond market, which limits its monetary policy options. Unlike the European Cen-tral Bank, it has not engaged in quantitative easing to fight deflationary pressures.

The currency has appreciated about 50 percent against the euro and roughly 20 percent against the dollar since 2008. That has proved a challenge for Swiss exporters, who send the lion’s share of their goods to the euro area and spe-cialize in producing pharmaceuticals and high-quality manu-factured goods.

Still, Switzerland ran a 17 billion franc trade surplus in goods with the U.S., with the value of its exports more than double the value of its imports from there, according to Fed-eral Customs Administration data for 2016.

(Source: Bloomberg)

TEHRAN — The Cen-tral Bank of Iran (CBI)

and the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) signed an agreement on Banking and Payment Arrangement (BPA) aiming to strengthen banking ties between the two countries.

The document was signed in Tehran on

Friday by Gholamali Kamyab, the vice gov-ernor of CBI and Riaz Riazuddin, the vice governor of SBP, IRNA reported on Satur-day.

The BPA aims to provide a settlement mechanism to promote trade between Iran and Pakistan. The mentioned mechanism will be used for the payment of trade con-

ducted via letter of credit and in accordance with international laws and regulations.

According to SBP’s official website, “In the next step, both the central banks will invite banks in their respective jurisdiction to act as Authorized Banks for undertaking trade transactions under this BPA,” Details of the mechanism will be issued by SBP in

due course.Earlier in March, Zubair Tufail, the pres-

ident of the Federation of Pakistan Cham-bers of Commerce and Industry, said that Pakistan and Iran would resume banking channels from April “which will pave the way for official trade between the two countries.”

Asian countries escaped the currency manipulator la-bel in the latest U.S. Treasury report, but remain wary of possible trade friction as President Donald Trump maintains his administration will seek to address trade imbalances.

Trump has said some U.S. trading partners, particu-larly China, manipulated their currency, but has since backed off that claim and acknowledged that China had not weakened the yuan to make its exports cheaper.

China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan remained on a list for special monitoring of currency practices, China by virtue of a massive trade surplus with the United States.

“Fixing trade imbalances will be an issue for the U.S. in its dialogues with China and Japan, while the manip-ulator threat has been put on the backburner,” a Japa-nese government official told Reuters.

The semi-annual U.S. Treasury currency report re-leased on Friday did not name any major trading part-ner as a currency manipulator, although it seemed to leave open the option for action in the future.

Trump has softened his rhetoric against China’s trade practices as Beijing has intervened in foreign ex-change markets to prop up the value of its yuan, and as he looks to China for help dealing with rising tension on the Korean peninsula.

“I think the United States decided to forego (labe-ling China a currency manipulator) this time because it wants China’s cooperation on North Korea,” said Take-shi Minami, chief economist at Norinchukin Research Institute in Tokyo.

“Depending on how the North Korean situation de-velops, we don’t know what will happen in half a year

(when the next currency report is due to be published).” New language

New language in the Treasury report citing a histo-ry of currency intervention in China, South Korea and Taiwan is in line with what experts say could be even-tual changes to the criteria aimed at deterring future manipulation.

With Washington pushing a trade agenda aimed at reducing deficits, experts say the most logical option is to lengthen the time period for reviewing currency market interventions from 12 months to several years.

“One thing we noticed was the report touched on the previous history of (currency manipulation). They’re telling us not to do so in the future and we have no intention of doing so,” a senior South Korean finance official said.

”Scrutinizing” China

The report showed the high priority the administra-

tion puts on addressing trade imbalances and said it would be “scrutinizing China’s trade and currency prac-tices very closely”.

The report came after China data showed its surplus with the United States was nearly unchanged in the first quarter compared to a year earlier at $49.6 billion, and cited China’s market protection as an impediment to a balanced trade relationship.

While Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping last week agreed to 100-day trade talks, U.S. business lead-ers in China have expressed concern about a lack of progress in gaining further access to the Chinese mar-ket despite years of negotiations.

Japan

The Treasury report’s language on Japan was simi-lar to past reports, and focused on the need for struc-tural reforms to improve domestic demand, analysts said.

“The basic message is that Japan needs to expand its domestic demand and one can read this as them telling Japan to import more American goods,” said Minami of the Norinchukin Research Institute.

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence will visit Japan next week for a bilateral economic dialogue, with U.S. of-ficials signaling they would press Japan to remove non-tarrif trade barriers and buy more U.S. products.

“The report won’t have an impact on the upcom-ing Japan-U.S. economic dialogue next week. But the U.S. administration’s focus on the trade deficit is something to keep an eye on,” said Nobuyasu Atago, chief economist at Okasan Securities in Tokyo.

(Source: Reuters)

Asian economies escape ‘manipulator’ tag, but expect more pressure on trade

Hackers released documents and files that cybersecurity experts said indicated the U.S. National Security Agency had accessed the SWIFT interbank messag-ing system, allowing it to monitor money flows among some Middle Eastern and Latin American banks.

The release included computer code that could be adapted by criminals to break into SWIFT servers and monitor messaging activity, said Shane Shook, a cyber-security consultant who has helped banks investigate breaches of their SWIFT systems.

The documents and files were re-leased by a group calling themselves The Shadow Brokers. Some of the records bear NSA seals, but Reuters could not confirm their authenticity.

The NSA could not immediately be reached for comment.

Also published were many programs for attacking various versions of the Win-dows operating system, at least some of which still work, researchers said.

In a statement to Reuters, Microsoft, maker of Windows, said it had not been warned by any part of the U.S. govern-ment that such files existed or had been stolen.

“Other than reporters, no individual or organization has contacted us in relation to the materials released by Shadow Bro-kers,” the company said.

The absence of warning is significant because the NSA knew for months about the Shadow Brokers breach, officials previously told Reuters. Under a White House process established by former President Barack Obama’s staff, compa-nies were usually warned about danger-ous flaws.

Shook said criminal hackers could use the information released on Friday to hack into banks and steal money in oper-ations mimicking a heist last year of $81 million from the Bangladesh central bank.

“The release of these capabilities could

enable fraud like we saw at Bangladesh Bank,” Shook said.

The SWIFT messaging system is used by banks to transfer trillions of dollars each day. Belgium-based SWIFT down-played the risk of attacks employing the code released by hackers on Friday.

SWIFT said it regularly releases secu-rity updates and instructs client banks on how to handle known threats.

“We mandate that all customers ap-ply the security updates within specified times,” SWIFT said in a statement.

SWIFT said it had no evidence that the main SWIFT network had ever been ac-cessed without authorization.

It was possible that the local mes-saging systems of some SWIFT client banks had been breached, SWIFT said in a statement, which did not specifically mention the NSA.

When cyber-thieves robbed the Bang-ladesh Bank last year, they compromised that bank’s local SWIFT network to order money transfers from its account at the New York Federal Reserve.

The documents released by the Shad-ow Brokers on Friday indicate that the NSA may have accessed the SWIFT net-work through service bureaus. SWIFT service bureaus are companies that pro-vide an access point to the SWIFT sys-

tem for the network’s smaller clients and may send or receive messages regarding money transfers on their behalf.

“If you hack the service bureau, it means that you also have access to all of their clients, all of the banks,” said Matt Suiche, founder of the United Arab Emirates-based cybersecurity firm Co-mae Technologies, who has studied the Shadow Broker releases and believes the group has access to NSA files.

The documents posted by the Shad-ow Brokers include Excel files listing com-puters on a service bureau network, user names, passwords and other data, Suiche said.

“That’s information you can only get if you compromise the system,” he said.

Attempt to monitor flow of

money

Cris Thomas, a prominent security researcher with the cybersecurity firm Tenable, said the documents and files re-leased by the Shadow Brokers show “the NSA has been able to compromise SWIFT banking systems, presumably as a way to monitor, if not disrupt, financial transac-tions to terrorists groups”.

Since the early 1990s, interrupting the flow of money from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere to al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other militant

Islamic groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries has been a major objective of U.S. and allied intelligence agencies.

Mustafa Al-Bassam, a computer sci-ence researcher at University College London, said on Twitter that the Shadow Brokers documents show that the “NSA hacked a bunch of banks, oil and invest-ment companies in Palestine, UAE, Ku-wait, Qatar, Yemen, more.”

He added that NSA “completely hacked” EastNets, one of two SWIFT ser-vice bureaus named in the documents that were released by the Shadow Bro-kers.

Reuters could not independently con-firm that EastNets had been hacked.

EastNets, based in Dubai, denied it had been hacked in a statement, calling the assertion “totally false and unfound-ed.”

EastNets ran a “complete check of its servers and found no hacker compro-mise or any vulnerabilities,” according to a statement from EastNets’ chief execu-tive and founder, Hazem Mulhim.

In 2013, documents released by for-mer NSA contractor Edward Snowden said the NSA had been able to monitor SWIFT messages.

The agency monitored the system to spot payments intended to finance crimes, according to the documents re-leased by Snowden.

Reuters could not confirm whether the documents released Friday by the Shad-ow Brokers, if authentic, were related to NSA monitoring of SWIFT transfers since 2013.

Some of the documents released by the Shadow Brokers were dated 2013, but others were not dated.

The documents released by the hack-ers did not clearly indicate whether the NSA had actually used all the techniques cited for monitoring SWIFT messages.

(Source: Reuters)

Hackers release files indicating NSA monitored global bank transfers

Tehran to host 20th Iran-Pakistan JEC meeting

TEHRAN — Tehran will host the 20th meeting of the Iran-Pakistan Joint Econom-

ic Committee (JEC) on Monday and Tuesday, IRNA reported.A trade delegation, com-

prised of high-ranking offi-cials from different Pakistani ministries, including Finance and Revenues; Commerce; Industries and Production; Information Technology and Telecommunication; Petro-leum and Natural Resourc-es; Ports and Shipping; and Water and Power, as well as banking officials and some from Pakistan’s chambers of commerce and industry left Islamabad for Tehran on Sat-urday night to participate in

the meeting.Pakistan’s Minister for States and Frontier Regions Abdul

Qadir Baloch will lead the delegation.As reported, the meeting will mainly focus on ways to ease

mutual banking ties between the two countries. The two sides plan to discuss signing a Free Trade Agreement (FTA), boost-ing cooperation in the field of energy, expanding relations between Iranian and Pakistani tradesmen, combatting illegal trade, improving trade volume, and etc.

Robots to replace 1 in 3 UK jobs over next 20 years, warns IPPRA leading thinktank has urged the government to spend billions of pounds helping poorly skilled workers in the less prosperous parts of the UK cope with the threat of the loom-ing robot revolution.

The left-leaning Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) said in a new report that those most at risk from automation were concentrated in low-skill sectors of the economy and were least able to adapt to change.

More than 10m jobs in the UK – a third of the total – are thought to be at risk from automation within the next two decades and the IPPR said the scale of the challenge required urgent action.

There was also evidence to suggest that the impact of automation would be geographically concentrated and so widen the north-south divide.

The IPPR research said that in four sectors alone – re-tail, hospitality, transport and manufacturing – 5m jobs were at risk, adding that a particular concern to ministers should be industries ripe for automation with a high proportion of workers least able to adapt.

“In wholesale and retail for example, there are over two and a half million jobs with a high potential to be automated, and three in four workers do not have a degree-level qualifi-cation and may lack adaptability,” the report said.

The IPPR called on the government to introduce a retrain-ing allowance of up to £2,000 for those replaced by machines, and for the newly created apprenticeship levy to be turned into a £5bn-a-year skills levy offering special help to the regions furthest away from London. (Source: The Guardian)

Finance and Economic Affairs Minister Ali Tayyebnia

APRIL 16, APRIL 16, 20172017 5I N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L Y

E N E R G Y

South Korea’s intake of Iranian crude oil soared to a record high in March and its first-quarter crude im-ports from Iran nearly doubled on year, reflecting Teh-ran’s efforts to raise output after the lifting of sanc-tions early last year.

The increase in volumes since international sanc-tions against Tehran were lifted in January 2016 has made Iran the second-largest oil supplier to South Korea after Saudi Arabia, in the first quarter of 2017, according to preliminary customs data on Saturday. Iran was fifth-largest in the first quarter of 2016, be-hind Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait and Qatar, according to data from Korea National Oil Corp (KNOC).

The official KNOC data ranked Iran as second-larg-est for the first two months of the year. The KNOC figures for March and the quarter are due out in one week.

In March, the customs data showed South Korea imported 2.26 million tons of Iranian crude, or 534,368 barrels per day (bpd), up 118.8 percent from 1.03 mil-lion tons a year ago, reaching a record. That was up 38.3 percent from 1.63 million tons in February.

The world’s fifth-largest crude importer and one of Tehran’s biggest customers shipped in 5.68 mil-lion tons of Iranian crude in the first three months of 2017, or 463,234 bpd, up 92.4 percent from the 2.96 million tons imported during the same period a year ago.

Meanwhile, oil shipments from Saudi Arabia to South Korea, rose 10.9 percent to 3.52 million tons, or 831,413 bpd, in March on year. That was down 2.6 percent from 3.61 million tons a month ago as the world’s top oil exporter complies with the OPEC deal to cut supplies.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting

Countries (OPEC) and some non-OPEC members reached an agreement to curb output last year by al-most 1.8 million bpd in the first half of 2017. Iran was exempted from the deal.

Korea’s crude oil imports from Saudi Arabia fell 10 percent to 10.44 million tons in the first quarter of this year, or 850,614 bpd, from 11.61 million tons in the previous quarter, but that was 5.7 percent higher on year.

Overall, Asia’s fourth-largest economy brought in

12.68 million tons of crude oil in March this year, or nearly 3 million bpd, up 10.1 percent from 11.52 mil-lion tons a year ago, according to the data.

For the first quarter of 2017, South Korea imported 36.94 million tons of crude, or 3.01 million bpd, up 4.6 percent from 35.32 million tons a year earlier.

Final data for the country’s March crude oil imports will be released by state-run Korea National Oil Corp (KNOC) later this month.

(Source: Reuters)

India is looking to fulfill energy needs of its neighboring countries to win their hearts and minds. Soon, Myanmar will be India’s first neighbor to receive its first consignment of diesel and other petroleum products from an Indian oil marketing company.

After China had opened up its purses to garner support from India’s neighbors, New Delhi made a strategic

decision to compete with Beijing for alliance with its neighbors.

An employee of Indian company Carzonrent interacts with a prospec-tive customer ahead of hiring a Mahin-dra Reva electric car in Bangalore

Sunjay Sudhir, the senior official re-sponsible for international cooperation in India’s Ministry of Petroleum & Nat-ural Gas, said that India is very close to

starting the supply of petroleum prod-ucts to Myanmar by road from Numa-ligarh Refineries Ltd in Assam.

“Right now, Myanmar market is very fragmented; there are hundreds of re-tail companies there. Whether Indian retail marketing company will enter into Myanmar or not it will depend on the size of demand. We are very close to supplying petroleum products

to Myanmar via road. If the quantities are huge then it makes more sense to invest in a pipeline,” Sudhir said.

Just this week, China and Myan-mar signed an agreement to build a 771-kilometer crude oil pipeline at cost of $1.5 billion. This will allow Chi-na to import 22 million tons of crude oil per year through the Bay of Bengal.

(Source: Sputnik)

South Pars deal with Total to be finalized within days: NIOC

Russia cuts oil shipments to Belarus in Q2 2017 Russia will lower oil shipments to Belarus from 6 million tons to 5 million tons in the second quarter of 2017, according to a new Reuters report.

Sources close to the matter said that oil flows to Belarus would increase in lieu of shipments to the Baltic Sea port of Primorsk, which is Russia’s largest oil port.

Transneft, the Russian oil pipeline company, also said that oil flows to Belarus would stay at the 24-million-ton level after Moscow and Minsk reached an agreement on oil payments. In the second half of 2017, the recipient country is expected to import 15 million tons of Russian oil.

Diplomatic tensions began when Belarus complained of the $132 per 1,000 cubic meters rate set by the Russian company Gazprom. Minsk started underpaying for the gas shipments, but agreed earlier this month to gradually pay the outstanding $726 million Moscow said it owed Gazprom—an agreement that was seen as good enough by the Russian side. In return, Russia would resume crude oil shipments to its neighbor. These were suspended last month as a retaliatory measure after Belarus refused to pay for the gas.

The news was a sharp turn away from the growing ten-sions displayed by the two countries earlier this year, with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko claiming that the country could survive without Russian oil and accusing Russia of reinstalling border controls because of Belarus’ move to the West. (Source: oilprice.com)

India turns to oil diplomacy in effort to compete with china in its backyard

Alaska’s reserves ripe for extraction despite low barrel prices Proven reserves in Alaska’s North Slope could be tapped de-spite low barrel prices, increasing the United States’ footprint in international energy markets, according to a new report by MarketWatch.

Currently, foreign firms are partnering with American com-panies to scope out opportunities in the northern state.

In March, Spanish oil firm Repsol SA announced the largest onshore oil discovery in the U.S. in three decades —a 1.2-bil-lion-barrel find on Alaska’s North Slope. Repsol has been ac-tively exploring in Alaska since 2008 and finally hit a big one with partner Armstrong Oil & Gas. First oil is expected by 2021.

The past five years have led to oil discoveries in the North Slope that have increased proven reserves by 14 percent. An-other noteworthy find was made by Dallas-based Caelus En-ergy, which claimed that the shallow waters of Smith Bay held 10 billion barrels of light oil, with one-third recoverable at a $50-barrel price. (Source: oilprice.com)

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Public & International Relations DepartmentAgricultural Support Services Company (ASSC)

Public & International Relations DepartmentAgricultural Support Services Company (ASSC)

The second year of EuropeMore than four decades ago, U.S. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger declared 1973 to be “The Year of Europe.” His aim was to highlight the need to modernize the Atlantic relationship and, more specifically, the need for America’s European allies to do more with the United States in the Middle East and against the Soviet Union in Europe.

Kissinger would be the first to admit that the Europeans did not take up his challenge. Nevertheless, we again

face a year of Europe. This time, though, the impetus is coming less from a frustrated U.S. government than from within Europe itself.

The stakes are as high as they were in 1973, if not higher.

Refugees have added to Europe’s strain, as has terrorism inspired by events in the Middle East or carried out by attackers from the region. Brexit, the United Kingdom’s exit from the European

Union, has now formally begun; what remains to be resolved are its timing and terms, which will determine its impact on the UK’s economic and political future and on others contemplating withdrawal from the EU. Greece and a number of other countries in southern Europe continue to be burdened by high unemployment, growing debt, and a persistent gap between what governments are being asked to do and what they can afford.

But of all the challenges confronting the EU, France’s upcoming presidential election holds the most significance for Europe’s future, and perhaps for that of the world. Polls indicate that any of the four candidates could emerge as the eventual winner. What makes this uncertainty different and truly consequential is that two of the four, National Front leader Marine Le Pen and far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, support policies far outside the French and European mainstream. If either wins the second-round run-off on May 7, it could mean the end of French membership in both the EU and NATO, raising existential questions for both organizations – and for all of Europe.

Such scenarios were unimaginable until only recently. For decades, Europe has constituted the world’s most successful, stable, and predictable region, a place where history seemed to have all but ended. The goal of making the continent peaceful, whole, and free had largely been realized.

Dramatic changeBut dramatic change has come to Europe. An even

greater challenge to modern Europe comes from its own politicians, who increasingly question the value of the EU, the heir to the European Economic Community established in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome.

The rationale behind Europe’s six-decade-long integration process – often called the “European project” – was always clear. Western Europe, and above all Germany and France, had to be unified to such a point that war, which had so often characterized the continent’s past, would become unthinkable.

This has been achieved, as has considerable economic progress. But, along the way, the European project lost its hold on Europe’s citizens. The EU’s institutions became too distant, too elitist, and too strong, not taking into account the national identities to which Europeans remained attached. The ill-advised creation of a monetary union without a fiscal counterpart made matters worse. The bureaucrats had overreached.

The rise of populist, nationalist candidates on both the left and the right in France and elsewhere in Europe is the result. And even if one of the two establishment candidates prevails in France, much will remain uncertain. The immediate crisis will have passed, but the long-term challenge will remain.

It is apparent that the EU needs to be rethought. It needs to move away from “one size fits all” to something more flexible. There also needs to be a rebalancing of power away from Brussels, the seat of most EU institutions, toward the national capitals.

Governments need to do more to create the prerequisites of faster economic growth while enhancing workers’ ability to contend with the inevitable elimination of many existing jobs as a result of technological innovation. Germany, whether led by its current chancellor or her principal opponent after its general election in September, will need to take the lead here.

Europeans, appropriately enough, will mostly determine Europe’s future. But the Trump administration also has a role to play. Trump’s shortsighted support for Brexit and other exits from the EU must end; a divided, weaker, and distracted Europe will not be a good partner in NATO. It may be true that Asia is more likely than Europe to shape the history of the twenty-first century. But the lesson of the last century should not be lost: what happens in Europe can and will affect global stability and prosperity.

(Source: project-syndicate.org)

By Julian Borger

APRIL 16, 2017APRIL 16, 20176I N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L Y

INTERNATIONAL

It is apparent that the EU needs to be

rethought. It needs to move

away from “one size fits all” to

something more flexible. There

also needs to be a rebalancing

of power away from Brussels,

the seat of most EU institutions,

toward the national capitals.

It’s easy to find agreement that Islamic State (ISIL) is a menace. How to definitively defeat the group is a different story. After big chunks of Iraq and Syria fell to the group’s terrorists in 2014, the U.S. put together a coalition to fight them. Operation Inherent Resolve, officially engaging more than 60 nations, is a campaign of airstrikes and other efforts to back the Iraqi military forces and Syrian militants fighting the group on the ground. Major powers have committed few ground troops to the fight. The strategy has kept their casualties relatively low, limiting related political blowback at home. Critics, including U.S. President Donald Trump, who took office in January, say the cautious approach also diminishes the chances of success.

The situationThe operation against ISIL has begun to make gains.

At the same time, the organization has become a wider threat, launching or inspiring terrorist attacks in Europe, the U.S. and around the Muslim world. Strategic vic-tories against ISIL, such as the retaking of the Iraqi city Fallujah in mid-2016, have been hard-won. An offensive launched in October to retake the group’s last major stronghold in the country, Mosul, was still underway in early 2017. So was a U.S.-supported operation initiated in Syria by other forces to unseat the group from Raqqa. The U.S. says ISIL has lost 47 percent of the territory it once held in Iraq and 20 percent in Syria. Yet American commanders have estimated that defeating it will take a decade or two. Fewer than 5,000 military personnel from the U.S. and 2,000 from elsewhere are deployed

in Iraq. About a 1,000 more Americans are in Syria. Rus-sia began airstrikes in 2015 against ISIL in Syria, back-ing government forces. The U.S. also conducts airstrikes against the group in Libya and, with NATO and Afghan government forces, is battling an affiliate in eastern Af-ghanistan.

The backgroundISIL was established in Iraq as an affiliate of al-Qaeda

in 2004. When American forces toppled Saddam Hus-sein, the country’s Sunni minority lost the dominant role it had held in his dictatorial regime. Like al-Qaeda, which eventually disowned it, ISIL aims to create a purified Islamic society, but its methods differ. It openly targets Muslim civilians, especially Shiites, whom it considers heretics, but also fellow Sunnis who oppose it. Weak-ened in 2007 by a surge of U.S. troops combined with

an organized Sunni backlash, the group revived with the 2011 departure of coalition forces. It honed its combat skills in the Syrian civil war that began the same year. In 2014, ISIL began conquering Iraqi and Syrian cities and declared a caliphate, a state that claims dominion over all Muslims. Initially, many secular Sunnis in Iraq fought alongside the group or welcomed it as a way of oppos-ing the Shiite-dominated central government and its re-cord of oppressing other ethnic and religious factions.

The argumentThe previous U.S. government, led by President Barack

Obama, rejected the use of significant U.S. combat forces in the battle against ISIL. Obama said the U.S. didn’t want to occupy another country again without a defined way out. There is also an argument that a major new foreign-troop presence would breed resentment among Iraqis and Syrians and fuel recruitment for ISIL. Obama stressed the value of strengthening Mideast allies for the fight. Skeptics say those partners are distracted by other disputes or are too weak or unwilling to be effective. These critics argue that world powers aren’t doing enough to defeat ISIL. The Institute for the Study of War estimates that 25,000 U.S. troops are needed for the job. Trump says that under his administration, the U.S. will be more aggressive against “radical terrorism.” He has pledged to “eradicate it com-pletely from the face of the earth.” In January, he ordered security officials to develop a new plan to defeat ISIL. The Pentagon delivered preliminary options in February that have not been made public.

(Source: Bloomberg)

Libya has become a vortex of human suffering, sucking in thousands of desperate migrants. They cross the Sahara to escape war, terrorism and destitution. Upon arrival many are held hostage by traffickers and starved, beaten and tortured. Now comes yet another level of horror, with the revelation that some are being publicly sold as slaves, according to reports by the International Organization for Migration documented this past weekend.

None of this would be possible if not for the political chaos in Libya since the civil war in 2011, when — with the involvement of a NATO coalition that included the United States — Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was toppled. Migrants have become the gold that finances Libya’s warring factions.

Dismantling the country’s human trafficking industry is one goal of a 90 million-euro ($95 million) program

adopted by the European Union Trust Fund for Africa on Wednesday. For African migrants in Libya, help cannot come soon enough. Of course, Europe’s primary goal is to stanch the flow of migrants to Europe, where anti-immigrant populism is on the rise. To that end, the EU is training the Libyan Coast Guard to rescue migrants at sea for return to Libya, where the International Organization for Migration, agencies of the United Nations and the German Corporation for International Cooperation are to work with Libyan authorities to improve conditions in government-run detention centers. People will be allowed to apply for asylum in Europe from those centers.

This sounds like a win-win situation, in which Europe will be able to reduce the flow of people it does not want, the role of human traffickers will be reduced, conditions for migrants in Libya will improve and fewer will drown at sea. But,

given the political chaos in Libya and the powerful forces that are driving Africans to cross the Sahara, this rosy scenario is far from assured.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson voiced support for a Group of 7 statement on Monday calling for swift political reconciliation in Libya. If the United States is

sincere about helping, it should step back from the administration’s proposal to cut aid to Africa. The United Nation-sponsored Libyan government of Fayez Serraj also needs to do its part in what must be a joint effort by concerned countries that places the welfare of African migrants foremost.

(Source: The NYT)

Fighting ISIL

Another degree of suffering in Libya

The ascent of Donald Trump, the volatility of his foreign policy and his tendency to fire off tweeted threats to nuclear-armed adversaries has brought one more wild card to the Korean peninsula, which already had more than its fair share.

Tensions would be high anyway in the run up to Saturday’s “Day of the Sun”, when the North Korean state celebrates the anniversary of the birth of its founder, Kim Il-sung. His grandson, Kim Jong-un, has shown himself anxious to outdo his forefathers, accelerating the pace of the regime’s missile and nuclear tests.

Very visible work has been under way at the mountainous nuclear test site where a new tunnel has been opened, giving rise to expectations that the country could carry out its sixth underground detonation of a nuclear device. This time, it could be a thermonuclear weapon that is tested, with a far higher yield than a simple fission warhead, or more than one bomb could be set off at the same time.

Alternatively, the preparations could be feint, intended to confuse and frighten the rest of the world, and Kim could use the grand military parade on the Day of the Sun to show off an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), which the regime is seeking to develop and would be capable of reaching the west coast of the U.S.

There has been little doubt in recent years that the end-point of the North Korean program is an arsenal of working ICBMs and nuclear warheads small enough to put on top of them. The dilemma of how to stop it reaching that goal is the hardest problem facing any U.S. administration, a point that Barack Obama repeatedly made to Trump during the presidential transition.

How Trump will handle that challenge is the greatest unknown hanging over the region. His instinctual response has been to bluster, mostly on Twitter, insisting that the North Korean development of an ICBM just “won’t happen” and warning

that if the Chinese did not do more to stop the forward march of Pyongyang’s program, “we will solve the problem without them”.

He has described U.S. naval deployments of aircraft carriers and submarines in the region as an “armada”, while his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, has declared that the Obama era of “strategic patience” is over.

Rattling-sabers is a particularly dangerous thing to do on the Korean peninsula. While the repercussions from a missile strike in Syria or the dropping of a giant bomb in Afghanistan can be contained, a preventative strike on North

Korea could set off a chain reaction. In war gaming such a confrontation, U.S. military planners under Obama came to the conclusion that Pyongyang’s most likely counter-move would be demolish Seoul with its artillery lined up behind the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea.

The U.S. and North Korea have thus been stuck in a position of mutual deterrence, which has stopped the outbreak of major new hostilities but not prevented Pyongyang’s steady advance towards the capacity to directly threaten the continental U.S., and Europe for that matter, with nuclear weapons.

Trump seems to be hoping that by introducing some unpredictability into this static scenario, he can frighten the Chinese government into putting real pressure on Pyongyang. There are some signs that might be working, with hints in China’s semi-official media that Beijing could tighten oil deliveries, North Korea’s lifeline.

If that fails however, and Kim’s instincts up to now have always been to defy pressure, Trump is left with the same dilemma as Obama, but perhaps with even further to walk to any future negotiating table.

(Source: The Guardian)

North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is real – how Trump will handle it is unknown

Trump’s instinctual response insisting North Korean development of an ICBM just ‘won’t happen’ and warning China to help may be

particularly dangerous.

Vacancy Announcement # IOM/IRN/2017/01An international organization is seeking for a

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law, international relations, social science

• Excellent command of English

• Excellent computer skills

Interested applicants should send their CVs to: IOMTEHRAN@iom.int by COB

1 May 2017 mentioning their “Name” and “Vacancy #IOM/IRN/2017/01” in

the subject line of their e-mail

ANALYSISAPRIL 16, APRIL 16, 20172017 7I N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L Y

Though old as history itself, thou art fresh as the breath of spring, blooming as thine own rose bud, and fragrant as thine own orange flower, Damascus, pearl of the East.”

-Mark Twain “The Innocents Abroad”

The first thing you notice while driving over Mount Lebanon is how close Beirut and Damascus are, and yet their respective situa-tions could not be further apart.

Last month, the war on Syria entered its sixth year. However, thir-ty years ago, Lebanon was where Syria finds itself today – embroiled in a painful and protracted not-so-civil ‘civil war,’ with numerous re-gional and global powers angling for influence, each pressing for their own agenda.

There’s a noticeable difference once you pass from Lebanon into Syria – the highway is paved and smooth, concrete bollards are neatly arranged, and there are no manhole ditches to avoid in the middle of the road. Images Bashar and his father Hafiz are prominent-ly displayed along the Damascus Road.

As one would expect in a coun-try at war, checkpoints are numer-ous and security is extremely tight along the rural highways, as well as in the city. Still, life goes on in the capital. Couples are walking, moth-ers are shopping, children playing and the restaurants are serving.

This is Easter week in Syria. In normal times, the week following Palm Sunday would see major pro-cessions and festivities, as families

take off work and get together to celebrate over an extended week-end. That’s still happening, but with an air of caution. Church volunteers are still out displaying their Easter decorations, and you can hear the voice of choir hymns gently echo-ing through the narrow streets of the Old City. Even with the cloud of conflict looming over the city, the spiritual vibration is still undeniable.

This is my first time in Syria, so it’s more than a bit surreal to be having a morning tea while hear-ing shells exploding only one and a half kilometres away as fierce fighting continues between Syrian government forces and Tahrir al Sham (the latest incarnation in the endless rebranding campaign of Al Nusra Front, aka Al Qaeda in Syria) terrorists (dispensing with the west’s regime change pc lexicon, they are not rebels, they are terrorists) in Jobar.

Last night, we went to sleep with the sounds of artillery and mortars, and awoken by more of the same at about 4:00am. The shelling is loud enough that the bedroom wall vibrates, with a few seconds delay between the sound of firing and the impact. Later today, we’ll get updates and perhaps learn exactly what landed and where, or maybe not. Unfortunately, after 24 hours of continuous random shell-ing, it becomes background noise.

But it also serves as a pungent re-minder that anyone’s fortunes can change in a split second.

Some residents intimated that in comparison to 2012 and 2013, the last two years has seen a relative peace for Damascus residents, but that apparent lull in fighting ended last month. Certainly, the tension is palpable. The city is on high alert after intense fighting broke out in the Damascus district of Jobar, and in Quaboun, and in the suburb of Ghouta.

Over the last five weeks, the west’s proxy column commonly known in US and UK media circles and by Senator John McCain, as “moderate rebels,” unleashed what American analyst Andrew Kory-bko cannily described last month as a Takfiri Tet Offensive. Not sur-prisingly, the Syrian government forces’ response to the Takfiri of-fensive in terrorist-occupied places like Jobar has been hard and swift. Syria’s is not like any other urban conflict. As in East Aleppo, terror-ists in Jobar have been operating from a a series of underground tunnels and bunkers which have been dug and developed over the last five years.

The purpose of this terrorist surge was twofold: to derail inter-national peace talks, and to fur-ther destablize previously stable areas, like Damascus, but also to try and stretch the Syrian Army’s resources, in effect handicapping attempts to regain control of piv-

otal control lines like Deir ez Zor. Meanwhile, an increasingly motley international conclave continues to huddle around the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa in preparation for the big show.

In the same way that Israeli air-strikes in Syria have coincided with al Nusra and ISIS movements on

the ground, the timing of this re-cent terrorist offensive in conjunc-tion with US military operations should not be ignored either. The fact remains that terrorist militants continue to benefit from the US-led Coalition and Israeli sorties, includ-ing after the recent US Tomahawk missile strike on Shayrat Air Base in Syria ordered by President Trump. The US President claims the US was “talking out” Syria’s ‘chemical weapon facilities’ in response to the alleged chemical weapons incident in Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib province last week. In his infinite wisdom, what Trump really did was take out a Syrian air base which was respon-sible for roughly 75% of air sorties launched against ISIS. Like Oba-ma before him, Trump’s claim that Washington’s illegal US operation in Syria is all about fighting ISIS – still rings as hollow as ever.

So it’s not outrageous to say that here are no more coincidences in this war.

In the Old City, you can see where Al Nusra mortar fire land-ed in the market souks. Despite the fighting, these are areas busy with city residents going about their daily business; shopping, having tea and coffee at cafes, and going to church and mosque. It’s fairly obvious that militants backed by the US, UK, Israel and the Gulf states do not care much for the people of Syria – a conclusion which becomes self-evident by the fact that in every instance where their is fighting in the country, ter-rorists routinely and as a matter of policy randomly launch mortar and artillery attacks into civilians areas. What else is not report-ed by western media outlets and what anyone here will tell you, is that the only inhabitants remaining in terrorist-held areas are terror-ist fighters, possibly their families, and residents who are not allowed to leave under threat of violence.

Certainly this was the case in East Aleppo, but for an area like Jobar, it’s highly unlikely very many ‘nor-mal’ civilians remain, as militants continue to bait government forces with ‘hit and hide’ mortar attacks while taking refuge in their ev-er-expanding network of tunnels below street level. Of course, you won’t hear that from any western mainstream media outlet. For any US or UK politician or pundit to try and characterize this as ‘fighting for freedom’ is ludicrous to the ex-treme and yet, this is how low the level of discourse has sunk thanks to the efforts of Washington and London’s chief propagandists who fill the ranks of what can only be described as forward military oper-ations and information warfare run out of CNN, followed by the BBC, NBC and equivalent outlets.

Simply put, what CNN and its mainstream cohorts have been doing on a daily basis since 2011 is projecting their own self-styled, fic-

tional narratives, tailored for a vir-tual sixth grade reading level audi-ence. To suggest that somehow the terrorist occupations of Damascus neighborhoods is an outgrowth of the Arab Spring should be treated as fake news on an epic scale.

‘Jewel of the Middle East’First impressions are of a bus-

tling landlocked Middle Eastern megatropolis, with the modern utility of Tehran’s social housing on the outskirts, but with some artisan motifs of Beirut. But none of this really means much in comparison to the time travel portal one steps through when entering one of the Seven Gates of Damascus into the Old City.

Here, history and tradition is preserved on a scale which hardly exists elsewhere.

A point which has been made by journalists and travel writers who visit Damascus is that you can often see a church located next door to a mosque. It’s a point worth reiterating – especially as western politicians and numerous ‘experts’ on Middle Eastern affairs continue to flood US television screens and talk radio, droning on endlessly about how sectarianism prevents differing communities from living together in countries like Iraq and Syria. It’s simply not true, but for some macabre rea-son, western experts seem to want it to be so.

Despite the war, Damascus still remains as an important reminder that the western sectarian narra-tive is political sophistry projected to the public in order to reinforce a distinctly western brand of divide and conquer geopolitics. Different religious sects have, and will contin-ue to thrive side by side – despite Washington and London’s best efforts to set them against each other.

(Source: 21st Century Wire)

Over the last five weeks, the west’s proxy column commonly known in US and UK media circles and by Senator John McCain, as “moderate rebels,” unleashed what American analyst Andrew Korybko cannily

described last month as a Takfiri Tet Offensive.

Damascus: Easter week in a city under fire

In the same way that Israeli airstrikes in Syria have

coincided with al Nusra and ISIS movements on the ground, the timing of this recent terrorist

offensive in conjunction with US military operations should not be

ignored either.

By Patrick Henningsen

Towards a New World Order in Eurasia: The 21st Century’s Great Game

Part Two

In anticipation of the construction boom, the Mian family in La-hore invested $30 million to build a second plant of Fast Cables, one of Pakistan’s largest cable producers. Instead of benefitting

from Chinese investment, the family fears bankruptcy. Cables for Chinese-built energy projects are not procured in Pakistan. They are imported tax free from China. For much the same reasons, pro-tests have disrupted China’s plans for a port and special economic zone in Sri Lanka’s Hambantota. The city’s gleaming, Chinese-built airport operates all of four flights a day. The story repeats itself elsewhere in Eurasia. The Federation of Pakistani Chambers of Commerce and Industry has raised grave doubts about the im-pact of CPEC, noting that the demography of Balochistan, a thinly populated area of 70,000 inhabitants would dramatically change with the influx of up two million Chinese and Pakistanis from other parts of the country. The cost of the debt trap in terms of land concessions that change demography is already evident in coun-tries like Tajikistan and has sparked protests in Myanmar. A Pakistani financial brokerage calculates that the Chinese rate of return on investment is a whopping 40 percent.

What makes Pakistan China’s riskiest investment goes beyond the pattern of commercial terms that are perceived as not be-ing equitable. The port of Gwadar, a key node in China’s string of pearls, a network of ports across Eurasia, was first inaugurated some nine years ago. It’s not much more active than the airport in Hambantota. Balochistan is engulfed in an insurgency whose con-notations go far beyond ethnic and nationalist aspirations. Political violence in Balochistan is as much an expression of long-standing local grievances as it is linked to a Pakistani state that sees militant proxies as part of its security, defense and foreign policies. Pakistan has been able to do so with the support in the 1980s of the United States during the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, and since then with the backing of Saudi Arabia and China. The result is a state in which Sunni Muslim ultra-conservatism has been embedded in significant segments of society as well as key branches of the state creating an environment in which the potential of violence is significantly enhanced. While Gwadar idles, Chabahar, an Indi-an-built port in Iran, some 60 kilometres further West is likely to push ahead.

Competition between Gwadar and Chabahar leads one au-tomatically to the role of Middle Eastern players, primarily Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Iran in shaping the future architecture of Eurasia. Pakistan is emblematic of the impact of Sau-di backing of ultra-conservatism in cooperation with governments willing to opportunistically play politics with religion. Yet, the rise of Sunni Muslim ultra-conservatism and limited Iranian successes in countering it contributes to the groundwork for domestic strife and instability across Eurasia.

Despite widespread perceptions and Saudi success in ensuring that ultra-conservatism is an influential player in Muslim majority countries and minority communities alike, Saudi Arabia has a weak hand that ultimately makes it unlikely that it will come out on top. That is nowhere more evident than in energy and particularly gas. What will determine the future of Eurasia’s energy landscape will not be Saudi oil but Iranian and Turkmen gas. Energy scholar Mi-chael Tanchum estimates that Iran will likely have 24.6 billion cubic metres of gas available for export in the next five years. That is enough to service two of Iran’s three major clients, Turkey, Europe and China. Likelihood is that it will certainly keep Turkey, leaving it with having to choose between Europe and China.

The jockeying for position in Eurasia resembles a game of Risk. The game’s outcome is unpredictable. Wracked by internal political and economic problems, Europe may not have the wherewithal for geopolitical battle. Yet, despite a weak hand, it could come out on top in the play for energy dominance. US backing of India in the Great Game and efforts to drive wedges into mostly opportunistic alliances such as cooperation between China and Russia and Rus-sia and Iran could help Europe compensate for its weakness. Sim-ilarly, a hard US approach towards Iran, particularly if Mr. Rouhani is defeated in the next election buys Saudi Arabia time. Assuming, last week’s missile strikes in Syria were not a one-off after which the United States reverts to a more isolationist attitude, greater US assertiveness could temporarily drive China and Russia and Russia and Iran closer together. That, however, would not make potential, if not inevitable differences between them go away.

The missile strikes may well have had another effect that is cru-cial for Eurasia. If much of Trump’s initial period in the White House was marked by a sense of insecurity and defensiveness about the legitimacy of his election, the missile strikes that enjoyed bipartisan and broad international support may have put that behind him. That has implications for the impact of US investigations into Rus-sian meddling in the US elections that benefitted not only Russia but also China. And it has an impact on populists in Europe with hopes for electoral success in France and Germany who in many ways are inspired by Trump’s success and may not want to stray too far away from his policies despite initial criticism of the strikes by the likes of French populist leader Marie le Pen.

The long and short of this all is: First and foremost, the future of Eurasia is up for grabsMultiple players, major ones like China, India and the United

States, and lesser ones like Russia, Japan and Middle Eastern states, are jockeying for position.

No one player is likely to emerge as the clear winner.Energy and ports are key pawns in Eurasia’s Great GameBlack swans could well determine the fate of various players. No

swan is bigger than the inherent, if not always immediately appar-ent, instability of autocratic regimes that have yet to truly deliver. That is certainly true for Central Asian states but equally true for Middle Eastern ones, including those like Saudi Arabia that rec-ognize that the status quo can no longer be maintained and that survival depends on successful efforts to upgrade autocracy and bring it into the 21stcentury.

In a world of interdependence, it may well be developments in states like those in Central Asia and the Middle East that determine the fate of strategies of the major players.

And just to end with more black swans, that no doubt others will pick up on: uncertainties in the region we are in today, South-east Asia. Major among those are Chinese territorial claims in the East and South China Seas.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.

By James M. Dorsey

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APRIL 16, 2017APRIL 16, 20178I N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L Y

INTERNATIONAL

On the face of it, Britain and its NATO allies might be tempt-ed to welcome Donald Trump’s remarkable U-turn from a global-isolationist candidate to an interventionist president. They will certainly welcome his warmer words about NATO which, he declared this week, is “no longer obsolete”, only three months after saying that it was. Theresa May and An-gela Merkel seem to have talked some sense into him, on that at least.

The unleashing of America’s biggest non-nuclear bomb in Afghanistan has neatly switched the spotlight from the Trump administration’s Russian connection and his ac-cident-prone start on the domestic front. The courts might block his crackdown on migrants, and Congress his attempt to reform Obamacare, but the commander-in-chief has no such constraints on foreign adventures (he did not consult Congress before Syria was bombed).

Mother of all bombs

In a break with the caution of the Obama years, Trump has given his military commanders more leeway to act with-out getting strikes signed off by the White House. It appears that the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB, also known as the “mother of all bombs”) fell on caves and tunnels used by ISIS in eastern Afghanistan on the initiative of the U.S. commander General John W. Nicholson. Quizzed by jour-nalists, Trump was happy to take the credit but cagey about whether he specifically authorized the bombing.

No doubt the president hopes that U.S., action in Syria and Afghanistan will send a powerful message to North Korea, where there is speculation that Kim Jong-un might soon launch the country’s most powerful nuclear bomb so far, despite Trump dis-patching a carrier strike group towards the Korean peninsula.

European diplomats believed that Trump’s election made

North Korea the world’s most dangerous flashpoint, and the unexpected tension between Washington and Moscow over Syria will not change that judgment.

Anxiety about the sheer unpredictability of Trump as the world’s self-appointed policeman will temper Europe’s relief that he will not turn his back on NATO after all.

The president’s reassuring remarks were designed to clear the air before he meets his NATO allies for the first time at a summit in Brussels next month.

However, he will doubtless come with a strong warning that they must shoulder more of the burden carried by the U.S. Only five of NATO’s 28 members, including the UK, have hit the agreed target to spend 2 percent of their GDP on defense.

NATO members

But money may not be enough. Trump will probably want his fellow NATO members to give a stronger commitment to

backing the U.S. with boots on the ground as America pursues a more muscular strategy against terrorists. That could cause problems for the EU nations who do peace but not war and for Britain’s already overstretched armed forces.

Trump’s surprise switch from “America first” to “world first” could carry more than a financial price for NATO members. The freer rein given to U.S. military commanders has al-ready led to an upsurge in civilian casualties in Iraq and Syria, according to groups who monitor them.

The Pentagon has admitted that an air strike in Syria acciden-tally killed 18 members of the U.S.-backed forces on Tuesday.

It appears no civilians were killed in the Afghanistan bombing, but there’s no guarantee that will happen in fu-ture interventions, especially in towns and cities and when terrorists ruthlessly use local people as human shields.

(Source: Independent)

Trump has switched from ‘America first’ to ‘world first’ – it’s a worrying change

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Historic center of RomeFounded, according to legend, by Romulus and Remus in 753 BC, Rome was first the center of the Roman Republic, then of the Roman Empire, and it became the capital of the Christian world in the 4th century.

The UNESCO World Heritage property encom-passes the whole historic center of Rome within the city walls at their widest extent in the 17th century, as well as the Basilica of St. Paul’s Outside the Walls.

The property, complex and stratified, includes outstanding archaeological areas integrated in the urban fabric, which result in a highly distinguished ensemble.

Founded on the banks of the Tiber River in 753 BC, according to legend, by Romulus and Remus, Rome was first the center of the Roman Republic, then of the Roman Empire, and in the fourth century, became the capital of the Christian world.

Ancient Rome was followed, from the 4th century on, by Christian Rome. The Christian city was built on top of the ancient city, reusing spaces, buildings and materials.

From the 15th century on, the Popes promoted a profound renewal of the city and its image, reflecting the spirit of the Renaissance classicism and, later, of the Baroque. From its foundation, Rome has contin-ually been linked with the history of humanity.

As the capital of an empire which dominated the Mediterranean world for many centuries, Rome be-came thereafter the spiritual capital of the Christian world.

(Source: UNESCO)

ROUND THE GLOBE

10I N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L Y

HERITAGE & TOURISM APRIL 16, 2017APRIL 16, 2017

Iran’s promising tourism industry falls short of qualified guides

TEHRAN — The promising tourism industry in Iran may be hampered by a

shortage of qualified tour guides, Ebrahim Pourfaraj, the chief executive of Iranian Tour Operators Association, said on Friday.

Addressing a press conference in Tehran, he assumed just a small portion of all registered tour guides in the country actually possess the skills to conduct tours for foreign tourists.

Only about 300 of the 7,000 authorized tour guides are qualified while the majority of them lack a basic knowledge of English, ISNA quoted Pourfaraj as saying.

To cope with the issue, the ITOA in close collabora-tion with Iran Tourist Guides Association is set to train proficient tour guides and help improve the quality of instruction, he added.

Massive efforts made by the government shoulder to shoulder with the private sector have stimulated growth in Iran’s tourism sector over the past couple of years. However, in comparison to established international norms, it is still pretty young, resulting in meagre ac-commodation and transport infrastructure in some parts of the country.

A view of the Colosseum, known as the Flavian Amphitheatre, in historic center of Rome.

TEHRAN — The ecotourism market in Iran has witnessed a growth over

the past couple of years, drawing more domestic and foreign backpackers to the pristine and relatively undisturbed natural areas of the country.

Some 530 ecotourism projects have been imple-mented since the current administration took office in 2013, Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts Organization Director Zahra Ahmadipour said on April 11.

“A total of 274 eco camps have been construct-ed throughout the country since the beginning of 2016,” she said, adding that such projects help gen-erate jobs and provide sustainable sources of in-come for locals.

The CHTHO has announced that the number of natural tourist sites has grown from 24 to over 320 during the past four years.

The organization is set to increase the number to 2,000 by the end of the sixth Five-Year Socio-Eco-nomic Development Plan, which ends in 2021. The eco-lodges will be constructed in about 500 villages across the country.

Popular ecotourism activities in Iran include mountain and desert treks, bird watching in coastal areas and wetlands as well as diving.

Due to a very diverse natural setting, Iran offers a lively and interesting environment to the natural loving travelers. It embraces temperate forests in the north with relatively high humidity and rainfall, deserts and salt lakes in the central parts, towering mountain ranges and picks, as well as glaciers and coastal areas.

Following a landmark nuclear deal clinched by Iran and world powers in 2015, which resulted in

lifting of some economic sanctions, Iran now finds itself back on travel brochures and is scrambling to

up its standards to cater to the demands of potential foreign travelers.

Iran moves into flourishing ecotourism market

T O U R I S Md e s k

T O U R I S Md e s k

H E R I T A G Ed e s k

TEHRAN — Euro-pean, Asian, and U.S.

tourists aboard the Golden Eagle luxury train, known as a 5-star hotel on wheels, visited three UNESCO World Heritage sites scattered across Khuzestan Prov-ince in southwest Iran on Saturday.

A total of 25 passengers visited Susa, Tchogha Zanbil, and Shushtar Historical Hydraulic System on the tenth day of a two-week tour named “The Heart of Persia”, which commenced in Tehran on April 6.

So far, the train has stopped over the cities of Mashhad, Mahan, Kerman, Yazd, Isfahan, Shiraz and Kashan as parts of its detailed itinerary. It will return to Tehran on day 12th of the tour, gifting passen-gers a three-day visit to the metropolis.

“The highlight of our stay in Tehran is undoubtedly the visit to the breathtak-

ing Crown Jewels Museum in the Central Bank of Iran Building, with its vast array of crown jewels used by the Qajar and Pahlavid royalty,” Golden Eagle website says.

“Golden Eagle Luxury Trains has been

fulfilling tours to Iran since 2014 and has received nothing but positive feedback, most travelers are pleasantly surprised at what an incredibly welcoming and friendly nation it is.”

Russia’s premier train, the Golden Ea-

gle was launched in 2007 by UK based GW Travel (now Golden Eagle Luxury Trains Limited). The company offers ex-clusive, long-distance rail tours through Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turk-menistan, Mongolia, China, and Iran.

Intl. tourists aboard Golden Eagle visit World Heritage sites in Iran

A cluster of domestic and international tourists pose for a photo while visiting an Iranian eco-lodge in central Iran.

A view of Tchogha Zanbil in southwestern Iran. The UNESCO World Heritage site is one of the finest surviving examples of the Elamite architecture in the globe.

In the air, that uneasy feeling of us vs. them

National Museum of Iran dedicates exhibit to ancient Tehran

TEHRAN — An exhibition of historical relics and archaeological treasures of

Tehran Province opened its doors to the public at the National Museum of Iran on Saturday.

The four-day exhibit embraces objects that date from the Neolithic era onwards, CHTN reported.

The objects have been unearthed in the cities of Rey, Varamin, Damavand and Tehran neighborhoods such as Darroos and Qeytarieh, the report added.

When a passenger was forcibly re-moved from his seat aboard an April 9 United Airlines flight to

Louisville, Ky., before it left the gate in Chi-cago, the video taken by onlookers seemed to capture the mood in the air: us versus them.

“There’s a lot of blame to go around, not the least of which is the overall culture of aviation where customer service issues have become law enforcement issues,” said Gary Leff, author of the travel blog View-fromthewing.com. “Rather than practicing de-escalation, any disagreement with the crew becomes seen as a threat.”

How the industry reached the unfriendly skies is a journey that goes back to 9/11, which ushered in greater security regula-tions and carry-on restrictions. In the after-math of 9/11, “not following crew instruc-tions immediately could be seen as a threat, and they take all threats seriously,” Mr. Leff said. “Airline employees are in positions of extreme power and authority.” Noting that not all crews are authoritarian, he added, “the emphasis has shifted.”

Adding to the challenges were the global recession and the fuel price spikes of 2008, when the number of fliers dropped and the cost to fly them soared.

“That sequence of 9/11, the fuel price spike and the recession forced airlines to reinvent themselves in a way that they probably always would have been if it was a clean sheet project,” said Seth Kaplan, man-aging partner of Airline Weekly, an industry publication.

Before the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, the government controlled airfares and routes, and airlines vied to differentiate themselves with meals and leg room. They hung on to these conventions, for the most part, until around 2008 when that reinven-tion introduced the idea of unbundling ser-vices like checked bags and meals, making them pay-per-use options.

Airlines also cut capacity, flying fewer planes with more people aboard. When the

economy rebounded, most carriers stuck with the practice or put more seats on big-ger planes.

“Their policy now is that capacity disci-pline is key to maintaining airline profita-bility,” said Douglas Kidd, the executive di-rector of the National Association of Airline Passengers, a group that advocates more transparency in fares, more comfort in the air and less intrusive security measures. “In the past, so many airlines were vying for market share. Now with consolidation, with four to five major airlines, they don’t have to worry about market share.”

Deregulation led to competitive pricing and new low-cost carrier entries like South-west Airlines that democratized air travel in the United States. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the average do-mestic fare in 1995 in today’s dollars was $459. In 2016, the average was $349, down

nearly 24 percent.But even a good deal can contribute

to frustration in the air when a ticket on one carrier offers more or fewer services than another, making it hard to compare fares. Southwest fares, for example, include checked bags, Delta Air Lines charges most passengers to check a bag, and Spirit Air-lines charges for checked and carry-on baggage.

“It’s not just between airlines but within the carrier, where different classes like econ-omy or premium economy mean different things,” Mr. Kaplan said.

Still, a ticket guarantees a flight, right? Yes, but as the United case illustrates, not necessarily the one a passenger has booked.

“When you buy a ticket, you subscribe to a Contract of Carriage that says basically that they can remove you at any time for

many reasons, from the government re-questing the space to you not smelling good,” said Mr. Kidd of the airline passen-gers’ association.

The carrier is obligated to transport the passenger by rebooking the flier on a future flight. At that point, the airline must com-pensate the passenger based on the desti-nation and length of delay.

United’s terms, which are standard in the industry, stipulate that the airline must com-pensate passengers on domestic flights who were involuntarily denied boarding on an oversold flight at double the fare they paid, up to $675, if the alternative flight is scheduled to arrive less than two hours after the original flight. Beyond that it must pay four times the original fare, up to $1,350.

Normally these sorts of boarding deci-sions are made in the gate area and rarely occur on the flight. In the United case, for-cibly bumping a passenger contributed to tension not just on that plane but across the industry. (United recently announced that it was offering all passengers on Flight 3411 reimbursement for the cost of their ticket.)

“It’s important to follow the directions of flight crew members, but when they don’t seem to make a lot of sense, it hurts avi-ation security as a whole,” said Jeffrey C. Price, professor of aviation management at Metropolitan State University of Denver.

Ejecting a flier may be legal, but it also affects passenger perceptions of an airline, even if passengers are required to follow a flight crew’s instructions, including surren-dering a seat.

“There is a lot of research in organiza-tional settings that suggests perceptions of unfairness lead to anger, hostility and spite-ful behavior,” wrote Elizabeth Popp Berman, an associate professor of sociology at the University at Albany in an email. “When an airline’s decision to remove passengers is seen as unfair because it does not conform to expectations about passengers’ rights or the airline’s obligations, it is not surprising that passengers will become less compli-ant.”

(Source: The New York Times)

Adding to the challenges were the global recession and the fuel price spikes of 2008, when the number of fliers dropped and the

cost to fly them soared.

T O U R I S Md e s k

Chief executive of Iranian Tour Operators Association Ebrahim Pourfaraj in an undated photo

When airlines reinvented themselves, some services, like checked bags and meals, became pay-per-use options. (Credit Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

Now, researchers from the University of Waterloo (UW) have released a composite image that appears to show proof of the existence of dark matter, stretching like a spider’s web between two neighboring galaxies.

“By using this technique, we’re not only able to see that these dark matter filaments in the Universe exist, we’re able to see the extent to which these filaments connect galaxies together”, Epps said.

Researchers from University of Waterloo deserve credit for the proclaimed ability in having traced out the existence of dark matter using weak gravitational lensing technique. The method outlined in a paper published by Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society explains why multiple images of galaxy pairs are needed.

Dark matter – the mysterious stuff that we know is there, but have no clue what it’s made of.

In the false color map, bright galaxies are indicated by the white regions, while the presence of the dark matter bridge is show in red.

Studies have already suggested dark matter exercises maximum stability between systems that are less than 40 million light years apart. Measurements from the COBE, WMAP, and most recently, the Planck space telescopes all show the universe was uniform to one part of 100,000.

Electromagnetic radiationThat effect is basically gravity – but while most mate-

rials that have mass also seem to either emit or absorb electromagnetic radiation or at least interact with nucle-ar forces, clumps of dark matter sit silently, making a bit of a dent in the surrounding fabric of the Universe but not responding to anything else.

The “image represents the average filament from the 23,000 pairs of galaxies”.

With access to the results of a multi-year sky survey from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope located in Waimea, Hawaii, the pair used weak gravitational lensing combining images from 23,000 galaxy pairs located 4.5 billion light-years away.

Enough concentrated mass in the foreground-dark matter in this case-will warp light from distant sources in the background. These threadlike strands formed just after the Big Bang when denser portions of the Universe drew in dark matter until it collapsed and formed flat disks, which featured fine filaments of dark matter at their joins.

All the stars, planets, nebulae and other objects in space that are made of conventional matter account for no more than 15 percent of the mass of the universe.

“For decades, researchers have been predicting the existence of dark-matter filaments between galaxies that act like a web-like superstructure connecting galaxies together”, astronomer Mike Hudson, said in a statement.

Last February, a team of global researchers an-nounced the discovery of a number of peculiar signals being emitted by our own neighboring galaxy, Androm-eda.

(Source: Normangee Star)

NASA announced it will be taking astro-nauts to Mars by the 2030s and plans to accomplish it by building a lunar space station and a deep space transporter. The SLS rocket is essential to this endeavor, the agency says.

The strategy, unveiled last week by NASA’s associate administrator Bill Gerst-enmaier, brings a few important changes from the previous three-phase plan.

Firstly, the agency is preparing to build a Deep Space Gateway or DSG — essen-tially a small space station orbiting the Moon, which is to be assembled with the help of the SLS, in three separate flights of the gigantic rocket.

According to a NASA news release, the DSG will be operated by a crew of four and will equipped with a habitation module, an airlock for spacewalks, and a propulsion module to allow maintenance services on the space station.

The DSG is intended to function as spaceport or launching pad for lunar landing missions, in an effort to extend space operations farther from Earth than before.

“Building the deep space gateway will

allow engineers to develop new skills and test new technologies that have evolved since the assembly of the International Space Station,” state NASA officials.

Between missions, the Orion is set to dock on the space station, which can support the four-member crew for up to 42 days, according to the release.

Deep space transportSecondly, the agency announced

its ambitious aspiration to build a deep space transport (DST) spacecraft — a reusable transport ship, which is to be resupplied and refurbished at the lunar space station, and will ultimately carry as-tronauts to Mars and back.

Designed to support a crew of four for about 1,000 days at a time and weigh-ing about 41 metric tons, the deep space transporter will be launched into space aboard the SLS in 2027.

For this purpose, the SLS is essential, as this is the only rocket powerful enough to transport the enormous vehicle into orbit. After its one-mission trip into the lunar orbit, the DST is expected to make three journeys to the Red Planet and back to Earth.

What the agency is planning to achieve is the validation that “long-dura-tion, distant human missions can be safe-ly conducted with independence from Earth.”

“Through the efforts to build this deep space infrastructure, this phase will en-able explorers to identify and pioneer innovative solutions to technical and

human challenges discovered or engi-neered in deep space,” shows the NASA news release.

The lightweight vest is called the Ast-roRad Radiation Shield and, according to some sources, could be tested as early as next year, when the Orion will be making its first trip around the moon.

(Source: Tech Times)

Japanese automakers are looking beyond the industry trend to develop self-driving cars and turning their attention to robots to help keep the country’s rapidly graying society on the move.

Toyota Motor Corp said it saw the possibility of becoming a mass producer of robots to help the elderly in a country whose population is ageing faster than the rest of the world as the birthrate de-creases.

The country’s changing demographics place its automakers in a unique situa-tion. Along with the issues usually asso-ciated with falling populations such as labor shortages and pension squeezes, Japan also faces dwindling domestic de-mand for cars.

Rehabilitation robotsToyota, the world’s second largest

automaker, made its first foray into com-mercializing rehabilitation robots on Wednesday, launching a rental service for its walk assist system, which helps pa-tients to learn how to walk again after suf-fering strokes and other conditions.

Toyota’s system follows the release by Honda Motor Co of its own walking assist “robotic legs” in 2015, which was based on technology developed for its ASIMO dancing robot.

“If there’s a way that we can enable more elderly people to stay mobile after

they can no longer drive, we have to look beyond just cars and evolve into a mak-er of robots,” Toshiyuki Isobe, chief officer of Toyota’s Frontier Research Center, told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday.

Speaking to reporters, he added that

mass producing robots would be a natu-ral step for the company which evolved from a loom maker in 1905 into an auto-maker whose mission is to “make practi-cal products which serve a purpose”.

Japan graying faster

Japan is graying faster than the rest of the world, with the number of people aged 65 or older accounting for 26.7 per-cent of the population in 2015, dwarfing the global average of about 8.5 percent.

As a result, demand for care servic-es for elderly people has boomed and a shrinking working population means that fewer able-bodied adults are available to look after them.

Globally, sales of robots for elderly and handicap assistance will total about 37,500 units in 2016-2019, and are ex-pected to increase substantially within the next 20 years, according to the Interna-tional Federation of Robotics.

At the same time, car sales in Japan have fallen 8.5 percent between 2013-2016, as older drivers stop buying cars while car ownership becomes less of a priority among younger drivers.

Like most major automakers, Toy-ota is still competing fiercely to de-velop self-driving cars, committing $1 billion to a robotics and A.I. research center.

Isobe conceded that it took Toyota longer to develop robots than cars, as it stretched the company further beyond its comfort zone. As a result, Toyota’s new walking assist system took more than 10 year to bring to market.

(Source: Reuters)

This 360-degree self-balancing scooter is a Segway for the impracticalFirst there was the Segway, which promised to revolution-ize cities but mostly changed the life of mall cops and tour guides. Then the hoverboards arrived, which were great ex-cept for how sometimes they explode. And then there was nothing new for a little bit.

The “inverted pendulum has been thoroughly mined for personal transportation innovations!” we sighed con-tentedly to ourselves.

Short for Über-ball, Üo is a self-balancing scooter that uses a single sphere for its “wheel,” and which can move and turn in any direction. It also looks like a JPL Mars rover prototype.

The passenger platform balances on top of a solid rubber ball, and three motors power the movement, up to speeds of roughly seven miles per hour. Controls are a combination of leaning the contraption for movement, and a joystick for orientation control.

What is this good for? That’s probably the wrong question to be asking. The real question is how anyone had the nerve to use a song called “I will deliver” as the background track to their Kickstarter video (of course this is a Kickstarter!)

(Source: The Verge)

U.S. streams carry surprisingly extensive mixture of pollutants: studyMany U.S. waterways carry a variety of pollutants, but not much is known about the composition or health effects of these chemical combinations. A new in-depth study, how-ever, is providing insight as it shows the mixtures are more complex than expected and contain compounds that could potentially harm aquatic species.

In previous work that built on European research, scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) tested streams across the U.S. for organic, or carbon-containing, contaminants. They found some evidence that these waterways contained complex blends of these pollutants. Paul M. Bradley and col-leagues are now releasing results from a much broader fol-low-up study conducted by the USGS and the U.S. Environ-mental Protection Agency. The researchers involved in this new investigation checked water samples from 38 streams for 719 organic chemicals.

More than half of these compounds showed up in the water samples. Every stream -- even those in undeveloped and uninhab-ited regions -- carried at least one of the organic contaminants, and some carried as many as 162. Among other compounds, the researchers detected caffeine; insecticides and herbicides including glyphosate, as well as byproducts from their degradation; antibac-terials such as triclosan; and pharmaceuticals including antihista-mines and metformin, a treatment for diabetes.

The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. With nearly 157,000 mem-bers, ACS is the world’s largest scientific society and a glob-al leader in providing access to chemistry-related research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences.

(Source: EurekAlert)

Scientific research suffers as funding fallsDwindling funds for scientific research could encourage scientists to cheat, a report released Friday by the Nation-al Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine finds. Additionally, research misconduct is eating up precious funds even as they grow scarcer.

The report, “Fostering Integrity in Research,” said the fund-ing crunch could hamper progress as scientists skip protocols and arrive at faulty conclusions.

Research misconduct, some of which was not detected for years, has led to an increase in the “number and percentage of research articles that are retracted and growing concern about low rates of reproducibility … (raising) questions about how the research enterprise can better ensure that invest-ments in research produce reliable knowledge,” Chairman Robert M. Nerem wrote in the report’s preface.

The U.S. devoted 2.81 percent of gross domestic product to research and development in 2012, with the private sector contributing two-thirds of that. The bulk of government re-search funding goes to defense.

The report emphasizes effective research is a process that includes planning, review of work by others, training the next generation of researchers and “effective stewardship of the scholarly record.” It is up to research institutions, the report said, to create an environment that supports integrity.

“Highly visible research misconduct cases continue to ap-pear regularly around the world,” the report said.

“Concerns about scientific research that have emerged in the scientific and general media over the past several years reinforce the need to rethink and reconsider the strategies used to support integrity in research environments.

Part of the problem involves the growth of research itself and its globalization, along with pressure from the media to generate controversy and political debate.

(Source: IBT)

S C I E N C EAPRIL 16, 2017APRIL 16, 2017 11I N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L Y

Canadian researchers create first map of universe’s dark matter

NASA intends to send humans to Mars by building deep space gateway

Tehran Municipality’s Transport and Traffic Affairs Depu-ty Mazyar Hosseini praised salient activities and meas-ures taken by Bank Shahr in backing development of metro (subway) lines in the country financially and said: “Giant steps have been taken by the Bank in sponsor-ing construction of subway lines in various parts of me-tropolis Tehran.”

Bank Shahr has played an important and key role in supporting construction of metro lines in metropolitan areas, he maintained.

Turning to the significance of subway lines in the country, he said: “In addition to the environmental is-sues and impact of developing rail lines to reduce air pollution, inauguration of each metro line, as long as 20 km, will generate employment opportunities for job-seeking people both directly and indirectly.”

Elsewhere in his remarks, he pointed to the con-struction operation of Metro Line 6, as long as 32 km, equipped with 27 stations and said: “With the attach-ment of its southern lot, as long as 6 km, Line 6 of Teh-

ran Urban and Suburban Railway Company (TUSRC) in Line 6 will be equipped with 31 stations.”

In the end, Tehran Municipality’s Transport and Traf-fic Affairs Deputy Mazyar Hosseini expressed his spe-cial thanks to officials of Bank Shahr for their unsparing and unflinching financial support on the construction operation of Line 6 of TUSRC and said: “Banking sys-tem should be at the service of “production” and “em-ployment” and fortunately, the bank has tried to be a pioneering bank in this respect.”

Coal concentrate production volume experienced a considerable 12 percent hike in Tabas and Alborz Markazi coal mines in the past Iranian calendar year in 1395 (ended March 20, 2017), Public Relations Dept. of IMIDRO announced.

Given the above issue, production volume of Coal Concentrate increased in Tabas and Alborz Markazi companies, affiliated to the Iranian Mines and Mining

Industries Development and Renovation Organization (IMIDRO).

IMIDRO put the coal concentrate produced by the said companies in 12-month period of the last Iranian cal-endar year 1395 (from March 20, 2016 to March 20, 2017) at 602,958 tons, show-ing a considerable 12 percent hike as compared to the last year’s correspond-ing period.

It should be noted that the two com-panies produced 539,797 tons coal con-centrate in 1394 (ended March 19, 2016).

Of total 501,521 tons of coal concen-trate produced in the past year, Tabas and Alborz Markazi companies produced 501,521 and 101,437 tons respectively.

Likewise, the two mentioned compa-nies of Tabas and Alborz Markazi pro-duced 1,688,081 tons of coal concentrate

in the past year, showing 21 percent growth as compared to a year earlier.

It should be noted that Tabas and Alborz Markazi coal concentrate pro-duction companies produced 61,106 tons coal concentrate in the last Iranian month of Esfand (Feb. 20 – March 21), extracted 141,524 tons of minerals and sent 67,423 tons of coal concentrate as well.

Official Highlights Bank Shahr’s Salient Activities in Developing Subway Lines

Significant 12% Increase in Coal Concentrate Production in “Tabas” and Alborz Markazi”

Japan automakers look to robots to keep elderly on the move

Toyota’s system follows the release by Honda Motor Co of its own walking assist “robotic

legs” in 2015, which was based on technology developed for its ASIMO dancing robot.

I N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L Y

S O C I E T Y APRIL 16, 2017APRIL 16, 201712

Scott Pruitt, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, heralded a new era of environmental deregulation on Thursday, in a speech at a coal mine that was fined last year for contaminating local waterways with toxic materials.

Pruitt said the new “back to basics” agenda for the EPA would focus on devolving oversight of clean air and water to individual states, and bolstering jobs in industries such as coal, oil and gas.

This new agenda for the EPA, bitterly opposed by many of the agency’s staff, was unveiled at the Harvey mine in Sycamore, Pennsylvania, on Thursday. Pruitt, who was presented with an honorary mining helmet, said the federal government’s “war” on coal was over in a speech to assembled miners.

“The coal industry was nearly devastated by years of regulatory overreach, but with new direction from President Trump, we are helping to turn things around for these miners and for many other hardworking Americans,” said Pruitt.

“Back to basics means returning EPA to its core mission: protecting the environment by engaging with state, local, and tribal partners to create sensible regulations that enhance economic growth.”

The new vision involves scrapping or rewriting rules that combat climate change, water pollution and vehicle emissions. A task force has been set up within the EPA to identify further regulations to be revamped.

Though Pruitt insisted that clean air and water will be maintained in this purge, the choice of venue for the announcement was jarring.

Consol Energy, which operates the Bailey Mine complex which includes the Harvey mine, was fined $3m in August for discharging contaminated wastewater into streams that flow into the Ohio River. In the settlement with the EPA and the justice department, it emerged that the mining operation exceeded effluent limits at least 188 times between 2006 and 2015.

Consol said it has improved its pollution control systems and that is “committed to being a good

neighbor” to nearby communities. The company has indicated that it wants to exit the coal business entirely after jettisoning seven mines in the past four years.

Bruce Niles, campaign director for Sierra Club’s “beyond coal” campaign said: “Pruitt’s record shows that he has put the profits of polluters before the safety of the public by attacking clean air and clean water safeguards over and over again.

“This toxic backdrop for Pruitt’s latest publicity stunt only proves his true priorities are with polluters, not people’s health.”

Coal miners were also present when Donald Trump signed an executive order last month that called on Pruitt to review the Clean Power Plan, the cornerstone emissions reduction policy of Barack Obama’s presidency. Trump has vowed to scrap the plan, which Pruitt opposed in the courts while attorney general of Oklahoma.

Pruitt has accused the Obama administration of advancing an “ideological agenda that expanded the reach of the federal government” and has promised to restore what he has called “core EPA originalism” by protecting air and water quality while helping create jobs.

n practice, this has involved the attempted

rollback of various regulations, including the venting of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, halting new vehicle emissions requirements and rewriting a limit on ozone pollution, which causes urban smog.

During his time in Oklahoma, Pruitt sued the EPA 14 times in opposition to its rules around pollutants, including mercury and smog.

Pruitt has repeatedly questioned mainstream scientific understanding of climate change. The EPA’s scientific integrity watchdog is currently investigating comments made by Pruitt that rejected the overwhelming scientific evidence that carbon dioxide is a key driver of global warming.

In March, Pruitt told CNBC that he “would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see”. The EPA’s scientific integrity policy demands that staff accurately represent scientific findings. The agency’s own website, in common with almost all climate scientists, states that CO2 is the “primary greenhouse gas that is contributing to recent climate change”.

The EPA administrator also recently decided to reject the conclusion of his own agency’s scientists who recommended that a widely used pesticide, chlorpyrifos, should be banned from farms.

EPA scientists warned that the pesticides could cause severe harm to children and farm workers, but Pruitt said chlorpyrifos would not be banned in order to provide “regulatory certainty” to businesses.

The EPA has been targeted by the Trump administration for stringent budget cuts. The agency has drawn up a plan that would lay off 25% of its employees and scrap 56 programs, including pesticide safety, lead toxicity and environmental justice. There would be new funding, however, for a 24-hour security detail for Pruitt.

The plan is the embodiment of Trump’s pledge to reduce the EPA to “tidbits” but is unlikely to be fully adopted by Congress, which decides funding levels for federal agencies.

(Source: The Guardian)

Scott Pruitt hails era of environmental deregulation in speech at coal mine

MIAMI (AP) — Authorities say a man packing a blue light and a BB gun pulled over a non-descript car on Interstate 95, ready to play “traffic cop” again. Bad move: the driver he pulled over is a real police detective.

The police report shows 46-year-old Pacheco Bustamante was arrested Friday morning on a felony charge of impersonating a Florida police officer.

It says Bustamante was driving a

Ford Crown Victoria similar to many police vehicles when he approached the detective’s unmarked car and activated a siren. The detective pulled onto the highway shoulder, then arrested Bustamante when it became clear he’s

no officer.The report says Bustamante told

police he had done this before.It wasn’t immediately clear if

Bustamante has found a real lawyer to represent him.

Police impersonator pulls over officer, needs real lawyer

When the cat’s away, the mice will play

Explanation: when no one in authority is present, the subordinates can do as they please

For example: When the teacher left for a few minutes, the children nearly wrecked the class-room. When the cat’s away, the mice will play.

Chicken out Meaning: to decide at the last moment not

to do something you said you would do, be-cause you are afraid

For example: Freddy chickened out of the plan at the last minute.

Beat around the bush Explanation: the expression is used to tell

someone to say what they have to say, clearly and directly, even if it is unpleasant

For example: Stop beating around the bush. Just tell me what has been decided!

ENGLISH PROVERB PHRASAL VERB ENGLISH IDIOM

ENGLISH IN USE

Organic products festival to open next weekThe 9th organic products festival will kick off on Saturday, December 31, at Tehran’s Goftogu Park.During the 7-day event, participants will offer organic agricultural products and medicinal herbs to the public, Mehr news agency reported on Tuesday.Currently, out of 206 fruit and vegetable markets in Tehran, 23 are offering organic products, the director general of fruit and vegetable organization affiliated with Tehran Municipality said.

هفته آينده: افتتاح جشنواره محصوالت ارگانيك

ــتان ــاه) در بوس ــم دى م ــنبه (يازده ــك ش ــوالت ارگاني ــنواره محص ــن دوره جش نهميــود. ــزار مى ش ــو برگ گفتگ

بــه گــزارش روز ســه شــنبه خبرگــزارى مهــر در مــدت يــك هفتــه برگــزارى اين جشــنواره شــركت كننــدگان محصــوالت ارگانيــك و گياهــان دارويــى خــود را عرضــه مــى كنند.

ــرد: در حــال حاضــر از 206 ــار خاطرنشــان ك ــوه و تره ب ــن مي ــل ســازمان ميادي مديرعامبــازار ميــوه و تره بــار در ســطح شــهر، 23 بــازار بــه ارائــه محصــوالت ارگانيــك پرداخته انــد.

LEARN NEWS TRANSLATIONLEARN NEWS TRANSLATION

Calling 911 A: Alright class, now that we’re all dressed up let’s see what professions you chose. Ah, I see a fireman, a police officer, a medic, and a lifeguard! Can anyone tell me what these people have in common?B: They save people from bad things?A: That’s right! Now class, if something bad happened and you had to get help, do you know what phone number you would call?C: 911!A: Yes, you would pick up the phone and dial 911. What are some emergency situations where you would need to dial 911?B: If my grandpa has a heart attack!C: If there is an accident!B: If a robber breaks into the house!C: If the fire alarm goes off!B: Pff! I wouldn’t call 911 if the fire alarm went off in my house. The only time that ever happens is when we’re having spaghetti for supper, and Mom burns the garlic bread, as usual.

Key vocabularydress up: to put on fancy dress, disguiseprofession: an occupation requiring special traininglifeguard: person who protects people from drowningpick up: take up by handdial: to press the buttons to make a telephone callheart attack: painful condition where the heart stops beatingrobber: who robs or stealsbreak into: to enter a house illegally, esp. by forcego off: to ring or sound loudly

Supplementary vocabularyburglar alarm: an alarm installed in a house or building that goes off if there is a break inhold up: to rob while armed, often at gunpointcrime scene: place where an illegal event took place and there is evidence there that police needhit and run: the crime of colliding with a person, their personal property (including their motor vehicle), or a fixture, and failing to stop and identify oneself afterwardsfender-bender: a collision between motor vehicles that produces minor damage

(Source: irlanguage.com)

L E A R N E N G L I S H

S O C I E T Yd e s k

University of Michigan unveils 1,500-pound Rubik’s CubeUniversity of Michigan mechanical engineering students have made one of the most popular puzzle games much larger. And tougher to solve.

Seven former and current students unveiled a 1,500-pound Rubik’s Cube during a ceremony Thursday inside the G.G.

Brown engineering building on the Ann Arbor campus. The massive, mostly aluminum structure is meant to be played by students and others on campus.

Four students came up with the idea three years ago and handed down the project to other students.

“It’s the largest solvable mechanical stationary Rubik’s Cube,” said Ryan Kuhn, a 22-year-old senior who helped assemble the giant puzzle this

week. “It was kind of an urban myth of North Campus, this giant Rubik’s Cube that’s been going on for a while.”

The oversized version of the brain-teasing 3-D puzzle, which has flummoxed players since its heyday in the 1980s, is much harder to decipher than its diminutive counterpart, said Kuhn, who called it an “interactive mechanical art piece.”

The puzzle is solved when the player is able to manipulate the cube until all nine squares on each of its six sides display an individual color.

“It’s very reasonable that it could take at least an hour” to solve, said Martin Harris, who helped conceive the project in 2014 while hanging out in the College of Engineering honors office.

(Source: Yahoo News)

TEHRAN — The Iranian city of Anzali will

play host to the meetings of Framework Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Caspian Sea (Tehran Convention) from April 16 to 20.

Representatives and experts from member countries of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkmenistan will attend the event which has been organized by Iran’s Department of Environment.

Participants to the meetings are to discuss the implementation of the protocol concerning regional preparedness, response and cooperation in combating oil pollution incidents (Aktau Protocol), the working group on monitoring and assessment and for the protocol on monitoring, assessment, access to and exchange of information and the draft protocol on monitoring, assessment and information exchange.

Aktau Protocol is the first one to the Tehran Convention ratified by all Parties

– Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation and Turkmenistan - and entered into force on July 25, 2016.

Tehran Convention is the first

regional legally binding instrument signed by all five Caspian littoral states. It serves as an overarching governance framework which lays down the general

requirements and the institutional mechanism for environmental protection and sustainable development in the Caspian Sea region.

Anzali to host meetings on protection of Caspian Sea’s marine environment

N.I.S.O.CInvitation For PrequalificationFirs

t Anno

uncem

ent

vendors who intend to participate in the A/M tender are requested to send their resume & tendency letter via fax / mail to the following address not later than 14 days after the second announcement.The applicants should have relevant background in supplying the required goods and capability to provide a bid bond of Euro …….. / Rls ……. in favor of NISOC.Iranian vendors shall submit their resume acc . to forms nos . 01,02 and 03 which are Available at www.shana.ir and www.nisoc.ir

Foreign Purchasing Dept.Kouy – e – Fadaeian Islam (New site) Bldg No. 104, ahwaz Iran

Tel / Fax No.: +98-61-34457437,2263256

Public RelationsWWW.NISOC.IR WWW.SHANA.IR http://IETS.MPORG IR

PERMIT NO.: 1396.213TENDER NO .: 31-32-09999-9009-6

National Iranian South Oilfields Company intends

to purchase the following goods:

North Korea on Saturday displayed what appeared to be new long-range and submarine-based missiles at a massive military parade celebrating the 105th birth anniversary of the nation’s founding president, Kim Il-sung.

The parade, attended by Leader Kim Jong-un, saw thousands of soldiers marching through the capital, Pyong-yang.

Weapons analysts said they believed some of the missiles on display were new types of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), enclosed in canister launchers mounted on the back of trucks.

North Korea’s Pukkuksong subma-rine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM) were also on parade. It was the first time North Korea had shown the mis-siles, which have a range of more than 1,000km, at a military parade.

As a nuclear-powered United States aircraft carrier group steamed towards the Korean Peninsula, a top North Korean official issued a warning against the Unit-ed States during the ceremony.

Choe Ryong Hae - widely seen by analysts as North Korea’s second most important official - said U.S. President Donald Trump was guilty of “creating a war situation” by dispatching U.S. forces to the region.

“We will respond to an all-out war with an all-out war and a nuclear war with our style of a nuclear attack,” said Choe.

State television showed Kim, wear-ing a black suit and white shirt, stepping out of a black limousine and saluting his honor guard before walking down a red carpet.

He then walked up to a podium and clapped with senior government officials to address the thousands of soldiers and a massive crowd taking part in the pa-rade.

The display suggested that Pyong-yang was working towards a “new con-cept” of ICBM, Melissa Hanham, a senior research associate at the U.S.-based Mid-dlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, California, told the Reuters news agency.

Joshua Pollack, editor of the Washing-ton-based Nonproliferation Review, told Reuters that the display indicates North Korea is progressing with its plan to base missiles on submarines, which are hard to detect.

N. Korea warns U.S. over aircraft carrier deployment

In his annual New Year’s address, Kim said that the country’s preparations for an inter-continental ballistic missile launch have “reached the final stage”. Analysts say commercial satellite imag-es from recent weeks indicate increased activity around North Korea’s nuclear test site.

North Korea warned the U.S. to end its “military hysteria” earlier on Saturday or face retaliation as the U.S. Navy deployed in the region.

“All the brigandish provocative moves of the U.S. in the political, economic and military fields pursuant to its hostile poli-cy toward the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) will thoroughly be foiled through the toughest counterac-

tion of the army and people of the DPRK,” North Korea’s KCNA news agency said, citing a spokesman for the General Staff of the Korean People’s Army.

“Our toughest counteraction against the U.S. and its vassal forces will be taken in such a merciless manner as not to al-low the aggressors to survive.”

It said the Trump administration’s “serious military hysteria” has reached a “dangerous phase which can no longer be overlooked”.

The U.S. has warned that a policy of “strategic patience” with North Korea is over.

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence travels to South Korea on Sunday on a long-planned 10-day trip to Asia.

North Korea, still technically at war with the South after their 1950-53 con-flict ended in a truce but not a treaty, has on occasion conducted missile or nuclear tests to coincide with big political events and often threatens the United States, South Korea and Japan.

U.S. military response to a N. Korean weapons test would be difficult

Although the Trump administration moved an aircraft carrier strike group toward Korea and warned that it would respond forcefully if N. Korea conducts a nuclear test this weekend, likely U.S. mil-itary options range from bad to worse.

Satellite imagery has shown prepara-tions at North Korea’s Punggye-ri nucle-ar weapons site, including more military personnel and mounds of dirt from re-cent excavations, U.S. officials and out-side experts said.

North Korea’s state media has warned that Kim Jong Un’s government may use Saturday’s national holiday, marking the birthday of the country’s founder, Kim Il Sung, for a weapons test, although it could be another ballistic missile or something less provocative.

The Pentagon has moved the Carl Vinson carrier strike group to waters near the Korean peninsula as a show of force and President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that submarines were also on the prowl if necessary.

The North Korean military on Fri-day accused the Trump administration of “maniacal military provocations” and threatened to attack U.S. bases in South

Korea and other targets “within minutes” if a U.S. attack is launched.

“We will go to war if they choose,” Vice Minister Han Song Ryol said in Pyong-yang.

Threats and bluster are part of a fa-miliar and long-running game of brinks-manship between the U.S. and North Ko-rea, but this time it has been made more dangerous by two volatile new players: Kim and Trump.

On Thursday, the U.S. Air Force dropped its most powerful conventional bomb, an 11-ton weapon, on a cave-and-tunnel complex that it said the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/Daesh) terrorists were using in eastern Afghan-istan.

Asked on Thursday if use of the huge bomb was meant as a warning to North Korea, Trump gave an ambiguous answer.

“I don’t know if this sends a message. It doesn’t make any difference if it does or not,” he said. “North Korea is a prob-lem. The problem will be taken care of.”

The problem has bedeviled the past three presidents.

Diplomatic accords meant to stop or slow North Korea’s nuclear develop-ment all faltered, and recent tests show the country is fast closing in on the ca-pability to build a ballistic missile that could reach U.S. territory in the Pacific or beyond.

U.S. Defense Secretary James N. Mat-tis twice this week sought to downplay the possibility of a U.S. attack and the significance of the carrier strike group, noting that U.S. warships regularly oper-ate in the western Pacific.

On Thursday, however, he offered tougher talk. “The bottom line is North Korea has got to change its behavior,” Mattis said.

The State Department spokesman, Mark Toner, warned of “an urgency to the situation.”

“Provocations from North Korea have grown, frankly, too common, too danger-ous to ignore anymore,” Toner said.

It’s unclear how Trump might respond to a nuclear test.

China issues stern warning to U.S., North Korea over their growing

Meantime, China issued a stern warn-ing on Friday to both the U.S. and N.

Korea, urging them not to push their re-criminations to a point of no return and allow war to break out on the Korean Peninsula.

In comments carried by China’s official Xinhua news agency, Foreign Minister Wang Yi said “storm clouds” were gath-ering, an apparent reference to North Korean preparations to conduct a new nuclear test and the United States’ de-ployment of a naval strike force to the waters off the peninsula. In addition, the U.S. military has been conducting large-scale military exercises with South Kore-an forces, drills that the North considers provocative.

“The United States and South Korea and North Korea are engaging in tit for tat, with swords drawn and bows bent,” Wang said at a news conference after a meeting with visiting French Foreign Min-ister Jean-Marc Ayrault, Xinhua reported. “We urge all parties to refrain from in-flammatory or threatening statements or deeds to prevent irreversible damage to the situation on the Korean Peninsula.”

If they allow war to break out on the peninsula, they must bear the historical responsibility and “pay the correspond-ing price,” Wang warned. In the event of war, “multiple parties will lose, and no one will win,” he said. “It is not the one who espouses harsher rhetoric or raises a bigger fist that will win.”

Wang also indicated that China is willing to broker a resumption of “dia-logue,” whether it be “official or unofficial, through one channel or dual channels, bilateral or multilateral.”

Trump called Chinese President Xi Jin-ping this week to enlist his support in re-solving the crisis, days after the two lead-ers conferred at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.

An influential Chinese newspaper, the Global Times, subsequently called for “se-vere restrictive measures that have never been seen before, such as restricting oil imports to the North” if Pyongyang en-gages in further provocative activity.

China, North Korea’s sole major ally and neighbor, which nevertheless oppos-es its weapons program, on Friday again called for talks to defuse the crisis.

China banned coal imports from North Korea in mid-February — poten-tially cutting off an economic lifeline — and Chinese customs data released on Thursday showed a 52 percent drop in imports in the first three months of this year, compared with the same period last year.

Meanwhile, the Japanese government is taking precautions of its own.

Its National Security Council has dis-cussed how to evacuate the roughly 60,000 Japanese nationals living in South Korea and how to deal with a potential influx of North Koreans, according to multiple local reports. These plans in-clude sifting out spies or soldiers who might be among the refugees.

The North Korean situation is getting more serious, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said on Friday. “We cannot turn away from this reality. The security environment surrounding Japan is getting tougher.”

(Source: agencies)

WORLD IN FOCUS 13I N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L Y

APRIL 16, 2017APRIL 16, 2017

Poison gas and the Holocaust: Spicer crosses a Zionist redline

1 Continuing to ignore the troublesome fact that the nature of and responsibility for the Syrian incident have yet to be established, Spicer next crossed a Zionist red line by at-tempting to portray the Syrian president as worse than Hitler. “You look -- You had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons,” declared Spicer. While Hitler, like the U.S. and U.K., had contingency plans to use chemical weapons, which included sarin, tabun and so-man, he did not deploy them to the battlefronts, possibly because he himself was a victim of a chemical attack in WWI.

Given Washington’s insistence that President Assad was responsible for the alleged chemical attack, Spicer was mere-ly trying to substantiate his assertion that Russia should re-consider remaining aligned with Syria. “So you have to, if you’re Russia, ask yourself is this a country that you and a regime that you want to align yourself with?”

So by hairsplitting on the technicality that neither the U.S. nor the Third Reich actually used chemical weapons at the bat-tlefronts, and accepting the Washington regime’s allegations on the Syrian chemical incident, Spicer was at least logically con-sistent. But of course, the Zionist lobby, ever vigilant to play the “Holocaust card” took Spicer to task for overlooking the Jewish victims of Hitler’s gas chambers, while conveniently ignoring the Roma, Slavs, the disabled, political dissidents, Soviet prisoners of war and others who also perished in the death camps.

Nevertheless, the outcry from the Zionist lobby was shrill. “On Passover no less, Sean Spicer has engaged in Holocaust denial, the most offensive form of fake news imaginable, by denying Hitler gassed millions of Jews to death,” said Ste-ven Goldstein, executive director of the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect. Most interesting was a remark by Zeke J. Miller, a political reporter for Time, who wrote, “Besides violating one of the cardinal rules of politics — Holocaust comparisons are always more risk than they’re worth — the gaffe distracted the White House from the good press it was earning for its decision to retaliate against the use of chemical weapons by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.”

One is tempted to ask, why are Holocaust comparisons such taboos? British scholar John Rose explains, “It is certainly pos-sible to understand the twentieth-century Nazi genocide as an adaptation, albeit with its own terrifying peculiarities, of good old-fashioned European imperialism and its nineteenth-century theories of biological race science.” Hitler sometimes compared his war on Russia to the Euro-American colonizers’ war on the North American Native Peoples; indeed, both were cases of the genocidal results of European imperialism.

To put it another way, the Holocaust, as the Nazi genocide is inevitably called in the western “democracies,” arose from the heart of the self-same European “civilization” that brought the Age of Enlightenment. Therefore, the “Holocaust” must be viewed as unique and the sole responsibility for it placed upon “ordinary Germans,” otherwise, the systemic flaws deep inside European civilization that led to the Nazi genocide might be exposed for all to see.

This is precisely the point former President of Iran Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was trying to make concerning the Nazi genocide in his 2006 letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Pointing to the high culture of Germany, Dr. Ahmadinejad began his letter saying, “If it had not been for Germany being a great contributor to progress in science, philosophy, literature, arts and politics; ... I would not have found the motive to write this letter.”

Clearly, Dr. Ahmadinejad’s intention was not to deny the Nazi genocide, as he emphasized, “I have no intention of ar-guing about the Holocaust.” Rather—and this is not well un-derstood in the west—his intention was to inquire subtly how could such a horrible atrocity have arisen in a nation at the heart of the great European civilization? As New-York based Iranian author Hooman Majd explained, the former Iranian President “was essentially getting the Europeans to admit that they were entirely capable of genocide again.” Never-theless, Dr. Ahmadinejad was branded a “Holocaust denier” by the Zionists and the western powers followed their lead.

Years before the Holocaust, chemical warfare itself arose from European high culture. The Jewish-German scientist Fritz Haber developed the idea of using poison gas as a weapon to an initially skeptical military, which quickly em-braced the new weapon of mass destruction after its deploy-ment on April 22, 1915 near Ypres, Belgium (later known as Flanders Fields) killed over 1,100 Allied troops. Ironically, the use of poison gas by the Third Reich during the Nazi geno-cide killed members of Haber’s own family.

Returning to the current imbroglio, Spicer postulated, “There’s no question that you can’t have a peaceful Syria with Assad in charge.” When pressed on further whether or not the White House now thinks “Assad must go” as did a previ-ous U.S. secretary of state, he confided, “I don’t see a future Syria that has Bashar al-Assad as the leader of that govern-ment.” Likewise, the Zionist lobby does not appear to see a future that has Spicer as press secretary of the Trump regime.

ISIL ‘grand mufti’ slain in Iraqi army missile strikes 1 Iraqi army soldiers and pro-government fighters from Popular Mobilization Units, have made sweeping gains against the Takfiri elements since launching the operation to retake Mosul last October.

The Iraqi forces took control of eastern Mosul in January after 100 days of fighting, and launched the battle in the west on February 19.

ISIL launches chlorine gas attacks in western Mosul Elsewhere, an Iraqi military officer said ISIL terrorists have

launched a gas attack in a newly-liberated area in western Mosul.The officer with the anti-terrorism forces said on Satur-

day that the attack occurred the night before in the al-Abar neighborhood, when ISIL fired a rocked loaded with chlorine. He said seven soldiers suffered breathing problems and were treated in a nearby field clinic.

The officer spoke on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to release information. (Source: agencies)

Kim Jong-un oversees display of N. Korea military force

The number of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/Daesh) terrorists killed after the United States’ army dropped its largest non-nuclear bomb was at least 90, Afghan officials said on Saturday, raising a death toll of 36 reported a day earlier.

Dubbed the “Mother Of All Bombs”, the 9,797kg GBU-43 Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) was un-leashed in combat for the first time on Thursday, engulf-ing a remote area of eastern Nangarhar province in a huge mushroom cloud and towering flames.

“ISIL fighters have suffered severe losses,” Ataullah Khogyani, spokesman for the provincial governor in Nangarhar, told Al Jazeera, adding that Afghan and U.S. forces were conducting clean-up operations in the site of the massive blast.

“We pulled out 90 dead bodies of fighters who lived underground in those tunnels and caves for years, oper-ating and planning attack across the country.”

The Pentagon said the target was a series of caves and bunkers used by ISIL.

Khogyani said that there were no military and civilian casualties.

“Civilians had moved out of that area years ago, no family lived there except for these fighters,” he said.

“There are strictly no civilians casualties as this raid was well coordinated and measured only to hit ISIL areas that are otherwise not possible to eliminate in a ground operation.”

An elderly man who lives close to the bombing site in Achin’s Momand Dara area told the AFP news agency the blast was so piercingly loud that his infant grand-

daughter was experiencing hearing loss. The massive bomb was dropped after fighting inten-

sified over the past week and U.S.-backed ground forces struggled to advance on the area.

A U.S. Special Forces soldier was killed last Satur-day in Nangarhar while conducting anti-ISIL opera-tions.

“The enemy had created bunkers, tunnels and ex-tensive mine fields, and this weapon was used to reduce those obstacles so that we could continue our offen-sive in Nangarhar,” General John Nicholson, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said on Friday.

President Ashraf Ghani threw his support behind the bombardment, saying it was “designed to support the efforts of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) and U.S. forces conducting clearance operations in the

region”.The bombing came only a week after U.S. President

Donald Trump ordered missile strikes against Syria in re-taliation for a suspected chemical attack, and as China warned of the potential for conflict amid rising U.S. ten-sions with North Korea.

Trump hailed the mission in Achin district as “very, very successful”.

Disproportionate actionHowever, the unprecedented attack triggered glob-

al shock waves, with some condemning the use of Af-ghanistan as what they called a testing ground for the weapon.

Some analysts called the action “disproportionate”.Hamid Karzai, former Afghan president, also con-

demned the U.S. military’s deployment of MOAB, saying Afghanistan should not be used as a “testing ground” for weapons.

The Taliban terrorist group, which is expected to soon announce the start of this year’s fighting season, also denounced the bombing.

“Using this massive bomb cannot be justified and will leave a material and psychological impact on our peo-ple,” the armed group said in a statement.

ISIL has made inroads into Afghanistan in recent years, attracting disaffected members of the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban as well as Uzbek fighters

But the group has been steadily losing ground in the face of heavy pressure both from U.S. air raids and a ground offensive led by Afghan forces.

(Source: agencies)

Afghanistan: Scores of ISIL terrorists dead in MOAB raid

U.S. military response to a N. Korean weapons test would be difficult

I N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L Y

W O R L D S P O R T APRIL 16, 2017APRIL 16, 201714

Cristiano Ronaldo’s management company Gestifute issued a statement on Friday night refuting a report that the Portugal star paid $375,000 to settle an allegation of rape.

Citing documents from an out-of-court agreement, German news magazine Der Spiegel reported that Ronaldo’s lawyer agreed to a settlement in 2010 after an alleged incident in Las Vegas a year earlier, soon after Ronaldo agreed to move from Manchester United to Real Madrid.

But Gestifute, founded by Ronaldo’s agent Jorge Mendes, called the story “a piece of journalistic fiction” and said Ronaldo would “do everything in his power” to protect his reputation.

The statement read: “Today, the German newspaper Der Spiegel published a long article regarding an alleged accusation of rape that would have been directed at Cristiano Ronaldo in 2009, i.e. about 8 years ago.

“The article is nothing but a piece of journalistic fiction.“The alleged victim refuses to come forward and

confirm the veracity of the accusation. The newspaper has based their entire narrative on documents which are unsigned and where the parties are not identified, on emails between lawyers whose content does not concern Cristiano Ronaldo and whose authenticity he cannot verify, and on an alleged letter that is said to have been sent to him by the so-called victim, but was never received by Cristiano.

“The accusations reported by the Der Spiegel are false, and Cristiano Ronaldo will do everything in his power to react against these. An accusation of an act of rape is disgusting and outraging, and he will not allow it to hang over his reputation.”

(Source: Soccernet)

Cristiano Ronaldo’s representatives call rape allegation ‘journalistic fiction’

Ex-NFL star Aaron Hernandez cleared of 2012 double murderA Boston jury on Friday found former New England Patriots football star Aaron Hernandez not guilty of murdering two men outside a Boston nightclub in 2012, following what prosecutors described as a dispute that began over a spilled drink.

The decision comes two years after another Massachusetts jury found the former National Football League tight end guilty of murdering an acquaintance in an industrial park near his home in June 2013. He is currently serving a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole for that killing.

Except for a weapons possession count, Hernandez was found not guilty of all charges associated with the double mur-

der, including witness intim-idation. He was immediately sentenced to an additional four to five years in prison on the weapons conviction and led from the courtroom with tears streaking down his face.

Gasps were heard from the gallery when the initial verdicts were read, and members of the victims’ families were led out of the courtroom, also in tears.

“What won this case was a dearth of evidence that con-nected Hernandez to these

shootings,” Ron Sullivan, a member of his defense team, told reporters after the verdicts.

Hernandez, now 27, was a rising star in the National Football League when he was arrested in 2013 and charged with murder-ing acquaintance Odin Lloyd.

More than a year passed before he was charged with the double-murder, which prosecution witnesses said was the result of his paranoid temperament, which led him to constantly sus-pect people were disrespecting and challenging him.

The jury heard from witnesses including a friend, Alexander Bradley, who said that he was in the car with Hernandez when the football star shot dead Cape Verdean nationals Daniel Abreu and Safiro Furtado outside the Boston nightclub.

Defense lawyer Jose Baez, best known for successfully de-fending Florida mother Casey Anthony in the 2011 trial in which she was charged with murdering her daughter, relentlessly ham-mered Bradley’s credibility, suggesting that he had killed the men and pinned it on Hernandez in exchange for immunity.

He pointed out holes in the prosecution’s case including the absence of forensic evidence tying Hernandez to the shootings - no fingerprints or DNA were found on the gun used in the killing or in the vehicle that Hernandez allegedly fired from.

Baez contended that investigators focused on Hernandez as a suspect because of his fame, and disregarded evidence that pointed away from the NFL star, who had a $41 million contract at the time of his arrest.

“They don’t want you to base your decision on evidence, they want you to base it on prejudice. They want you to say he’s got tattoos, he’s different than us. They want you to say he’s a celebrity, he’s different from us,” Baez told the jury in his closing argument. “That’s what they’re basing their case on.”

Dan Conley, district attorney of Suffolk County, said the not-guilty verdicts showed the difficulty of solving a drive-by shooting.

“Our theory of this case stands,” he told reporters, “It points inescapably to Hernandez.”

(Source: Reuters)

Ethiopia’s Berhanu Hayle seeks a Boston Marathon repeatEthiopian runner Lemi Berhanu Hayle will defend his Boston Marathon title in a wide open race on Monday against a men’s field that includes the first American champion in three decades and no clear favorite.

Berhanu Hayle won last year’s race in two hours 12 minutes 44 seconds after pulling away from twice champion and coun-tryman Lelisa Desisa, who is not competing this year.

The last men’s repeat winner was five-time champion Robert Kipkoech Cheruiyot of Kenya, who completed a triple in 2008.

An Ethiopian woman, Atsede Baysa, will also be defending her title after winning in 2:29:19.

Berhanu Hayle’s main challengers will include countryman Sisay Lemma, who ran 2:05:16 in Dubai last year, and Kenyans Geoffrey Kirui who ran 2:06:27 in Amsterdam last year and Em-manuel Mutai, who was second in New York and Chicago, and has the field’s fastest personal best of 2:03:13.

The hilly Boston course usually leads to slower times than other major marathons.

“Any move (Berhanu Hayle) makes will be taken seriously by the others,” said Scott Douglas, a contributing editor at Runner’s World. “With no clear standouts this year, Boston will be a very interesting race to watch.”

Making a farewell appearance will be Meb Keflezighi, who gave Boston an emotional boost when he became the first American man to win in three decades in 2014, one year after a pair of broth-ers of Chechen origin killed three people and injured more than 200 at the finish line with a pair of homemade bombs.

Keflezighi, 41, plans to retire from competition after Novem-ber’s New York City marathon.

“It will be very emotional to get to Hopkinton (where the race starts), but I’m excited. I know the course and I’m 100 percent healthy,” he said.

Galen Rupp, who won marathon bronze at the Rio Olym-pics but has had foot problems this year, and Jared Ward, who wrote his masters thesis on marathon pacing, join a large U.S. contingent. Strong women contenders include Kenyans Gladys Cherono, Edna Kiplagat and Brigid Kosgei.

These women will be racing in part because of Kathrine Swit-zer, who became the first woman to finish the then all-male Bos-ton race with a bib 50 years ago.

Switzer, 70, will wear the same number - 261 - when she steps to the line to race again on Monday. “I will put on the full regalia: the bib plus the eye liner, mascara and lipstick,” she said.

(Source: Reuters)

FC Porto’s president has apologised for his club’s fans chanting that they wished rivals Benfica had been on board the plane that crashed with Brazilian team Chapecoense.

Some Porto fans chanted “I wish Benfi-ca had been on Chapecoense’s plane” during a handball match between Porto and Benfica on Wednesday.

In a letter provided by the club to The

Associated Press, Porto president Jorge Nuno Pinto da Costa wrote to Chapecoense to apologise for “the insulting chants.”

Pinto da Costa added that Porto would like to help the Brazilian club rebuild from the November 2016 crash that took the lives of most of its team. The crash in Co-lombia killed 71 of 77 people on board, including 19 Chapecoense players.

(Source: Soccernet)

Porto apologise for handball fans’ chants about Chapecoense crash

Former NFL star player Todd Heap hit and killed his 3-year-old daughter on Friday while he was moving his truck in his driveway at his Arizona home, media reported.

The unidentified girl was hit at about 4 p.m. in Mesa, Arizona. Rescue workers took the girl to the hospital where she died, an ABC affiliate reported.

Heap was not impaired and there

was no suspicious circumstances surrounding the incident, police told ABC 15 Arizona.

The Pro Bowl tight end played 12 seasons in the NFL for the Baltimore Ravens and Arizona Cardinals. Heap, a popular player with the Ravens during his 10 years in Baltimore, remains the team’s all-time touchdown leader with 41.

(Source: Reuters)

Former NFLer Heap kills daughter in accident in Arizona: media

Emily Lima started playing football at the age of 13 at Saad, one of the first clubs involved in women’s football in Brazil. The former winger’s career took her to Spain, Portugal and Italy before she was forced to hang up her boots when she was just 29 due to a knee injury.

She had never thought about becoming a coach, but her brother Weber’s insistence changed the course of her life.

“My plan had been to work in the administrative side of women’s football,” she explained. “But my brother kept saying I would make a good coach. He thought I should specialise more in the technical side of things. He made me consider it and in 2010 I started working as technical assistant and supervisor at Portuguesa in Sao Paulo. And in 2011 I became CA Juventus coach.”

Those were the first steps that led to her becoming the first ever female head coach of Brazil’s women’s national team. She was appointed in November 2016 aged just 36 and has since recorded five wins in as many games in charge.

“It’s all been very positive,” she said. “The players have understood things very well and that motivates us to keep working hard every day.”

Lima is also able to carry out her initial desire for administrative work through supervising Brazil’s national youth teams. “We’ve systemised the work we’re doing throughout the age groups. We’ve now got a universal playing style in order to make the transitions easier.”

Lima is aware that football changes quickly and is constantly learning from her role models: “I’ve liked Felipao [Luiz Felipe Scolari] ever since he was at Palmeiras - the way he dealt with his players and his training caught my eye. And I’ve been following Tite for a long time now. Internationally, I read about Guardiola and Mourinho a lot. What they’ve done is incredible.”

Changes afootIndeed, Lima recognises that the changes in football

have brought vast improvements: “I can see that everything is much easier for female players now. The majority of my

team play their club football outside Brazil. And those that play in Brazil are the best athletes and are primarily at Corinthians or Santos, where they’ve got very good working conditions.”

Nevertheless, there is still plenty of work to do: “I want women’s football to change in this country, and for it to establish itself. Changes are already happening with CONMEBOL, CBF and FIFA, such as making it obligatory for men’s clubs to have a women’s team too. Those are good steps. We should all work together, joining forces with the clubs so that the national team can take another step forward.

“As women we have to prove every day that we can fulfil roles that have traditionally been held by men. It’s a cultural

and social shift, but the barriers are starting to come down and we’re gradually gaining ground.”

Emily Lima’s CV Playing career

In Brazil: Saad Esporte Clube, Sao Paulo, Sao Bernardo, Barra de Teresopolis and Veranopolis.

In Spain: Estudiantes Huelva, Puebla de la Calzada, Prainsa Zaragoza y Unio Esportiva Lestartit

In Italy: Napoli Yamamay International career: Brazil U-17, Portugal senior side

Coaching careerJuventus, Portuguesa, Brazil U-17, Brazil U-15, Sao Jose

(Source: FIFA)

Emily Lima, a pioneer in Brazil’s dugout

McLaren Formula One boss Zak Brown is ‹barking mad’ to let Fernando Alonso race the Indianapolis 500 with so little experience of ovals, Red Bull team princi-pal Christian Horner said on Friday.

McLaren announced earlier in the week that the Spaniard, a double world champion, would miss the May 28 Monaco Grand Prix to compete at The Brickyard in the biggest event in U.S. open-wheel racing.

The switch has been made easier by McLaren’s lack of competitiveness in Formula One, with the once-great team currently last in the championship without a point after two races and Alonso clearly frustrated with the situation.

“Look, it’s a difficult one for Fernando, he’s having a tough time,” Horner, smiling, told reporters at the Bahrain Grand Prix.

“Zak’s got the problem of a depressed driver on his

hands, he’s trying to keep him motivated and he’s come up with this idea to send him to Indianapolis. He must be barking mad, it’s the nuttiest race I’ve ever seen.

“No testing, he’s just going to jump in the car...Turn One there is a proper turn as well, it’s not just easy flat all the way round. So I think he needs to see a psychiatrist, personally.”

Indy Car racing has a reputation as a considerably riskier series than Formula One, with cars running nose-to-tail at around 240 mph.

Last year’s race was won by a rookie, however, for-mer F1 driver Alexander Rossi with the same Andretti Autosport team that will run Alonso’s car.

Horner said he would not have let his drivers, Dutch teenager Max Verstappen and Australian Daniel Ric-ciardo, race in the event.

“I think if a driver commits to a team it’s like disappear-

ing with another girlfriend half way through the year, it doesn’t seem like the right thing to do,” he said.

Brown, an American former racer and marketing expert who was appointed McLaren’s executive director last year, defended himself as he sat next to Horner in a post-prac-tice news conference.

“Fernando’s not scared,” he said. “He’s going to get some testing in. He is studying Indianapolis, it’s obviously going to be a challenge but he wants a challenge.

“I think he’ll have a car capable of running at the front, and I think he will be extremely prepared. I think he’s going to put on a good show and he’s very smart. And that’s what you need to be around Indianapolis.

“I think it’s going to be good, everyone’s going to be watching.”

(Source: Reuters)

Alonso’s Indy 500 plan is ‘barking mad’, says Horner

S P O R TAPRIL 16, 2017APRIL 16, 2017 15I N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L Y

Faceless, failing club owners could learn from Juve’s dazzling dynasty What kind of people do you want to have running your foot-ball club? That’s the question fans of teams as different as Arsenal, Blackburn Rovers, Coventry City and Leyton Orient are asking themselves. Whether faltering just out of range of ultimate success or threatened with a plunge into oblivion, those supporters are turning their anger on owners they see as variously incompetent or delinquent.

For fans of Juventus, the answer is simple. As Paulo Dy-bala wheeled away after scoring the first of his two beautiful goals against Barcelona in the Italian champions’ stadium on Tuesday night, the TV director switched to a shot of celebra-tions in the directors’ box, where Andrea Agnelli, the club’s president, was sharing hugs with a small group including his second cousin, John Elkann.

Elkann, 41, is the chairman of the Fiat empire, which was founded in 1899 by his great-great grandfather, Giovanni Ag-nelli. He is the great-grandson of Edoardo Agnelli, the first member of the family to take control of Juventus back in 1923. His grandfather, the charismatic and politically powerful Gi-anni Agnelli, was its president from 1947-54 and a friend of zebra-striped heroes from John Charles to Michel Platini.

Six years ago Elkann handed the presidency of the club to his second cousin, who happens to be his exact contemporary in age. The son of Gianni Agnelli’s brother Umberto, the club’s honorary president from 1970 until his death in 2004, Andrea Agnelli oversaw the construction of a new stadium and the winning of five consecutive league titles under Antonio Conte and Massimiliano Allegri, with a sixth on the near horizon.

For 94 years the club has been in the same hands, and although the majority of the hundreds of thousands of local workers employed by Fiat during that time were probably fans of Torino, Juventus built an enormous following among Italians both at home – particularly in the poor south – and in exile. Give or take a couple of referee-rigging scandals, one of which saw them relegated for the first time in 2006, the Agnelli dynasty has enjoyed almost a century of success.

Family members are visible at every match, maintaining a tradition of close involvement that was illustrated when the Gazzetta dello Sport, previewing Tuesday’s match, spoke to two men involved in previous meetings between Juventus and Barcelona. Paolo Montero, the tough Uruguayan defender who broke the Serie A record for red cards and is now coach-ing in Argentina, was reminded that the current president had named him as his favourite Juventus player. “I thank him,” he said. “He could have chosen Zidane, Del Piero or one of the other superstars, but he chose a ‘normal’ one like me. Maybe that’s because I represented the club’s desire to fight and win.”

The Scottish striker Steve Archibald recalled the night in 1986 when he made his way to the dressing room in Juven-tus’s old Stadio Communale after scoring the decisive away goal for Terry Venables’ Barcelona in a European Cup quar-ter-final. “A door opened,” he said, “and out came a tall, ele-gant figure in a magnificent overcoat, with five or six people clearing a path for him. He stopped and offered me his hand and said (in English): ‘Good goal.’ That was Gianni Agnelli, just as elegant in his mentality.”

Are you listening, Stan Kroenke of Arsenal, the Venky’s bunch at Blackburn, Francesco Becchetti of Orient or those faceless Sisu hedge fund managers who are dragging Cov-entry to the brink of extinction? Do you see what good own-ership can mean to a club and to those who give it their lifelong allegiance? Do you understand that such stewardship requires calmness, consistency, and a sensitivity to the char-acter of the club and its community?

Roman Abramovich certainly does. Whatever you think of how he came by his billions, he and his Chelsea lieuten-ants have been mostly swift and perceptive in their decisions, accepting the cost of dealing with problems as soon as they appear before moving on with the next solution. From the somewhat rackety institution presided over by the Mears family and Ken Bates, the west London club has been trans-formed into a formidable power via a process of which the spectacular Herzog & de Meuron stadium, a giant concrete sea anemone, will represent the final stage.

It makes a difference that Abramovich is often to be seen at Stamford Bridge, sharing the emotions of the team and their fans, having made the short journey from his Kensington man-sion. Although he may not speak in public, he makes it clear that he cares. One small but symbolic consequence of his takeover was that for the first time in many years the club’s former players, snubbed by Bates, were welcomed back as honoured guests.

The venture could go badly wrong, of course, were some political upheaval to rupture Abramovich’s relationship with Vladimir Putin and undermine his status in the world of busi-ness. But that reflects the underlying threat to all top-level English clubs with foreign ownership, alongside the fear that a slump in the Premier League’s global popularity could in-duce those benefactors to take their investment elsewhere.

Few clubs can enjoy the extreme good fortune of a Ju-ventus or a Chelsea, whether bankrolled by the old money of aristocrats or the new wealth of oligarchs. But even at less exalted levels, apparently hopeless situations can be rescued. Leeds United seemed to be in freefall until the chaotic Mas-simo Cellino sold half his shares to another Italian, Andrea Radrizzani, who is supporting the sensible work being done by their latest manager, Garry Monk. The story of Brighton & Hove Albion, a single goal away from dropping out of the league altogether in 1997, is one of steady revival under the poker player and property investor Tony Bloom, whose re-gime may lead the club, with its shiny new stadium, to the Premier League as soon as next week.

At Crystal Palace, the businessman Steve Parish led a con-sortium that enabled the club to flourish after narrowly avoid-ing bankruptcy six years ago. Like Ben Robinson, who has spent 40 years as chairman guiding Burton Albion from non-league to Championship football, Parish seems to recognise that an emphasis on strong and constructive links with the community comes only a narrow second to making correct football decisions.

What fans really want from an owner, whatever his or her background, is the sense of an authentic personal commit-ment. The vacuum left by its absence tends to be filled, as can been seen in the season’s final stages, by a cynicism that stinks the place out. (Source: Guardian)

Arsene Wenger is worried that a new big-money contract for Alexis Sanchez could destabilise the Arsenal dressing room and “put the club in trouble.”

Wenger is well aware that Arsenal will have to shatter their current wage structure in order to keep Sanchez at the club for the long term, but with Mesut Ozil also demanding similar money, he is wary of the effects such deals could have on their teammates.

Asked if he was concerned that paying one star player a massive figure could destabilise the team, Wenger told a news conference: “Always. But we must accept as well that modern life has changed a little bit. We always had a wage schedule that was respected, and players earn so much money now that the cases have become much more individual than global.

“But you have many different opinions there. Some people tell me, ‘just give him what he wants.’ But then you cannot respect anymore any wage structure and you put the club in trouble as well.”

Earlier on Friday, Wenger had laughed off a report that Arsenal were ready to hand Sanchez a new deal worth £300,000-a-week in order to stave off reported interest from Chelsea, Manchester City and several clubs from abroad.

Sanchez and Ozil are both out of contract at the end of next season, and Wenger has previously said he is hopeful that deals can be reached with the star duo this summer.

Any new contracts may have to be worth at least

£250,000-a-week to put the pair on par with the Premier League’s top earners -- a raise of more than £100,000-per-week for each player.

And with a handful of other players set to negotiate new deals this summer as well -- including Aaron Ramsey, Jack Wilshere and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain -- it could lead to more demands for higher wages.

“That is why you have to make the decision in an objective way. Always the club has to be the priority,” Wenger said. “I understand as well that top players is a big priority but at the end of the day, even for important players, you can only pay as much as you can afford.”

Sanchez is one of many top stars who have been linked with a big-money move to China this season, where clubs are paying salaries that are higher than any on offer in Europe.

But Wenger reiterated that players have to take the level of competition into their decision-making as well and not only focus on where they can make the most money.

“I think every club and every player has to make decisions,” Wenger said. “Where are your priorities? Where do you want to play? I think the first priority for top players is to play with the best players and in the best league. The best combination of playing at the top and [making] big money is in England at the moment. So China for me is not a debate.”

(Source: Soccernet)

Arsene Wenger: Huge Alexis Sanchez contract could put Arsenal ‘in trouble’

Iran’s Shahrdari Varamin won the Asian taekwondo Clubs Championship for the third time in a row.

The holder Shahrdari Varamin defeated another Iranian finalist Shohadaye Modafe Haram 4-1 in the final match which was held in Seyyed Rasoul Hosseini Hall in Sari, situated north of the capital Tehran.

Iran’s Moghavemat finished in third place after Omani team withdrew from the third-placed match.

The two day competition brought eight teams, namely Shahrdari Varamin, Shohadaye Modafe Haram of Sari and Moghavemat from Iran, Oman, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq (two teams) together.

(Source: Tasnim)

Shahrdari Varamin wins Asian Taekwondo Clubs Championship

TEHRAN — Persepolis football team defeated Machine Sazi of

Tabriz to win Iran Professional League (IPL) with three games to spare.

The Reds defeated strugglers Machine Sazi 2-0 in Tabriz’s Yadegare Emam Stadium.

Ali Alipour gave Persepolis a 1-0 lead just 29 seconds into the match.

Mehdi Taremi scored his 15th goal from the penalty spot in the 70th minute.

Persepolis won the title for the third time in IPL founded in 2001.

This is the first time in the Iranian league a team win the title with three games left.

Persepolis became runner-up on goal difference last season.

“This is my third championship in three different countries. I think Persepolis deserved to win the title because we are the best team in Iran at the moment,” Branko Ivankovic said in the post-match news conference.

“I would like to thanks my staff, players, and our supporters who backed us during the league,” the Croat added.

“We could have scored more goals in this match but our strikers missed their opportunities. We want to win the three remaining matches as well,” Ivankovic stated.

With the result, Machine Sazi were relegated from the IPL as the first team.

S P O R T S

d e s k

Persepolis crowned Iran Professional League champion

Iranian international defender Ramin Rezaeian has been linked with a move to Greek giant Panathinaikos.

According to Sport24.gr, following the eye-catching performances of Karim Ansarifard and Masoud Shojaei, the Greek football teams have shown interest in signing the Iranian player.

Panathinaikos has already linked with Iranian players Mehdi Taremi and Saeid Ezatolahi.

Rezaeian had reportedly reached

an agreement with Club Brugge but his agent said that he will likely join an Eredivisie team.

The 27-year-old player was forced to leave Persepolis after a row with the team’s head coach Branko Ivankovic.

Rezaeian has made 17 appearances for Iran national football team and scored two goals.

He was under contract with Persepolis until mid-2018.

(Source: Tasnim)

Ramin Rezaeian linked with Panathinaikos

Iran’s Persepolis is ninth in the current Club Asia Ranking, released by footballdatabase.com.

Persepolis is almost champion of Iran Professional League and represents the Persian Gulf country in the AFC Champions League.

Branko Ivankovic’s team sits ninth in the ranking with 1533 points.

Al-Ahli of Saudi Arabia leads the table with 1616 points, followed by Jeonbuk from South Korea and

Saudi Arabia’s Al-Hilal.Iran’s Esteghlal is 15th with 1525

points and Tractor Sazi sits 18th with 1502 points.

Real Madid has moved up three spots to lead the Club World Ranking with 2044 points.

Persepolis ranks 202 in the Club World Ranking, while Esteghlal sits in 220th place and Tractor Sazi is 257th.

(Source: Tasnim)

Persepolis among top 10 in Club Asia Ranking

Actor Aref Lorestani dies at 46

Cartoonist Masud Shojaei-Tabatabai named Islamic Revolution Artist of the Year

Serbian culture minister Vladan Vukosavljevic to visit Tehran book fair

Exhibition of social documentary photos underway at Iranian Artists Forum

TEHRAN — The spokesman of

the 30th Tehran International Book Fair, Homayun Amirzadeh, announced on Saturday that Serbian Minister of Culture and Information Vladan Vukosavljevic is scheduled to pay a visit to the cultural event in May.

“Mr. Vukosavljevic who is deeply interested in Iranian culture and art stressed his readiness to visit the Tehran book fair at the Belgrade International Book Fair last October when Iran was a guest of honor at the event,” he said.

“The usual preliminaries were prepared and he will be with us at the Tehran book fair,” he added.

The 30th Tehran International Book Fair will be held from May 3 to 13.

TEHRAN — The seventh exhibit of the

Sheed Photography Awards, which are presented to documentary works on social themes, opened at the Iranian Artists Forum on Friday.

Works by 13 photographers including Azadeh Besharati, Azin Haqiqi, Ali Khara, Morteza Rafikhah, Hamed Sodachi, Sadeq Suri, Javad Maktabi and Adel Pazyar, selected by members of a jury, are being shown until April 23.

Yumi Goto, an independent art and documentary photographer from Tokyo, along with several Iranian photographers selected the collection of photos on display.

Photos by Mahin Mohammadzadeh and Farshid Tighesaz, the two Sheed winners in 2016, are featured in the special section of the exhibit.

In addition, a number of workshops have been arranged during the event.

Photographer Heidar Rezai will review documentary photography in

the media today, while the photography of crisis by Vahid Salemi will review the Plasco tragedy on Monday.

Plasco, a 17-storey mega mall in downtown Tehran, collapsed to the ground three and a half hours after it caught fire on January 19, and sixteen firefighters and a number of citizens lost their lives in the tragic incident.

Social documentary photography will be discussed by Kiarang Alai on Wednesday.

The Iranian Artists Forum is located on Musavi St., off Taleqani Ave.

TEHRAN — Actor Aref Lorestani, who

was mostly known for the roles he played in most of the comedy series that Mehran Modiri directed over the past two decades, died of heart failure on Saturday. He was 46.

His death was announced by screenwriter Amir-Mehdi Juleh who collaborated with Modiri in most of the TV series, the Persian service of ISNA reported.

Lorestani was introduced by Modiri in his “Miscellanea 77” in 1998. However, his skills evolved out of the portrayal of the corrupt police Baladolmolk in “Bitter Coffee”, the first

episodes of which were released in September 2010.

He also played roles in “The Marriage Supper” and “Equation”, both directed by Ebrahim Vahidzadeh, and “Selection” by Turaj Mansuri and “Mani and Neda” by Parviz Sabri.

TEHRAN – The Book City Institute in Tehran will be hosting a meeting

on the Persian poet Sadi (C. 1213-1291) and French poet and novelist Victor Hugo (1802-1885).

Academy of Persian Language and Literature director Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel will deliver a speech during the two-day event, which will open on April 18.

Iranian literati, including Mir Jalaleddin Kazzazi, Ahmad Samiei Gilani, Fatemeh Eshqi, Tahmures Sajedi, Fereidun Majlesi, Asghar Nuri and French scholar Jean-Marc Hovasse will also discuss Sadi and Hugo at the event.

The meeting will be organized with help of the Sadi Foundation in Tehran and Iran’s cultural office in France, and Paris Diderot University to commemorate Iran’s Sadi National Day.

Victor Hugo is considered one of the greatest and best-known French writers. He is mostly famous for his novels “Les Miserables” and “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame”.

One of the greatest figures of classical Persian literature, Sheikh Muslih ud-Din Sadi Shirazi is famous worldwide for his Bustan (The Orchard) and Gulistan (The Rose Garden).

TEHRAN — Cartoonist Masud

Shojaei-Tabatabai, secretary of the International Holocaust Cartoons Contest in Tehran, has been named the Islamic Revolution Artist of the Year.

Shojaei-Tabatabai was honored at the Andisheh Hall of the Art Bureau on Friday during the closing ceremony of the Week of Islamic Revolution Arts.

Filmmakers Ebrahim Hatamikia and Mohammad-Hossein Mahdavian, and authors Behnaz Zarrabizadeh and Hamid Hessam were the other nominees for the title this year.

Speaking at the ceremony, the Islamic Ideology Dissemination Organization (IIDO) Director, Hojjatoleslam Seyyed Mehdi Khamushi, said that there has been a deep relation between the art of revolution, and the art and artists of other countries.

“The lessons that the Islamic

Revolution have given us have highly influenced the region and we can see how the revolution has attracted the hearts and how it shines in the region,” Khamushi said.

“We can see how the books on the Sacred Defense (the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war is known as Sacred Defense in Iran) have attracted the attention of readers. Islamic Revolution poetry is one of the best, while the Sacred Defense cinema is among the best of its kind,” he remarked.

He hoped that the art of revolution would make additional progress and would be promoted increasingly.

The Art Bureau organizes the Week of Islamic Revolution Arts every year to remember Morteza Avini, the acclaimed documentarian who was martyred by a landmine in 1993 when he was making a documentary in the former Iran-Iraq war zone in southwestern Iran.

ORLANDO, FLA. (Reuters) — The largely testosterone-fueled Star Wars movie franchise has added an important new female character in the eighth film, “Star Wars: The Last Jedi”, director Rian Johnson said on Friday at a fanfest in Orlando.

Johnson said the movie, scheduled for release in December, is still in post production.

Kelly Marie Tran plays Rose, a maintenance worker in the Resistance. Johnson said her character embodies the notion that even the most unlikely person can step up and become a hero. He said her part is the biggest new role in the film.

Lucasfilm also live-streamed to fans worldwide the first movie trailer that features Rey, played by Daisy Ridley, wielding a light saber under the guidance of Luke Skywalker who tells her that it’s time for the Jedi to end.

Ridley was brought into the franchise in the seventh movie, “The Force Awakens”, as a lead character. Fans have been expecting Lucasfilm to add more females to the cast.

The movie poster shows Rey on an intense red

background pointing her light saber skyward, the beam dividing images of Skywalker and Kylo Ren. The poster harkens back to the poster for the first Star Wars film in

1977 in which Skywalker similarly pointed the beam up.The movie stars were on hand during the 2017 Star

Wars Celebration at the Orange County Convention Center.

The popular 40-year-old Star Wars franchise in recent times has been criticized for a lack of recognizably female characters. Carrie Fisher was beloved for her role as Princess Leia, a character who was part of the original cast. Fisher died in December, but filmed scenes in The Last Jedi before her death.

The movie franchise is popular equally with male and female fans. Disney bought the franchise from creator George Lucas in 2012 for $4 billion. Three years later, the company announced plans for new 14-acre Star Wars “lands” at both its Orlando and Anaheim, California, parks, capitalizing on the lucrative brand much as Universal Studios did at its Orlando parks with the Harry Potter phenomenon.

The Star Wars attraction will dwarf Disney’s other themed lands and feature two new rides, including one in which guests can captain the Millennium Falcon spaceship.

NEW YORK (Reuters) — After a turbulent U.S. presidential election and a rollercoaster start to President Donald Trump’s administration, this year’s Tribeca Film Festival will come with a statement.

Environmental, political and social issues all feature strongly in the 200-strong selection of feature films, documentaries, television shows and immersive installations

on offer during the April 19-30 festival.Co-founder Jane Rosenthal said choices

for the 16th festival included themes of the environment “and the fact we are an open society and everyone is welcome here.”

“Artists can express things sometimes that no politician can,” Rosenthal told Reuters Television.

Films about food waste, the protests

over the Dakota Access Pipeline and the endangered white rhino are among a dozen projects linked to Earth Day, which falls in the middle of the festival on April 22.

A retrospective documentary about Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez, who was at the center of a 2000 custody and immigration battle; a documentary on maverick political operative Roger Stone; and “Copwatch,”

about the U.S. citizens who film police activity and arrests, are just some of the offerings tackling social and political issues.

On a lighter note, the festival will open next Wednesday with a documentary about record producer Clive Davis - the man behind the success of singers like Whitney Houston, Kelly Clarkson and Jennifer Hudson.

Star Wars products are lined up at the annual Star Wars Celebration where Walt Disney Co licensees are selling a new Luke Skywalker action figure, limited-edition Stormtrooper helmets and other coveted merchandise, in Orlando, Florida, U.S., April 14, 2017.

(Reuters/Zach Fagenson)

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A R T & C U L T U R E

New director appointed to Iranian Society of Cultural Works and Luminaries

TEHRAN — Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Reza Salehi-Amiri has

appointed Hassan Bolkhari as the new director of the Iranian Society of Cultural Works and Luminaries.

Researcher Bolkhari was named the top researcher of the year in the field of art in 2015. He was also the Art Research Center director for several years.

Mehdi Mohaqqeq was the former director of the society.

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Book City Institute to host meeting on Sadi, Hugo

Next Star Wars movie to feature new female character

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Environment, politics and “The Godfather” on Tribeca Film Fest menu

Films on war against Daesh to come under spotlight at Fajr festival

TEHRAN — A lineup of ten films will be reviewed during the 35th Fajr International

Film Festival in the Broken Olive Trees section, which screens films about the ongoing war against Daesh (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq, the organizers announced on Saturday.

Among the films are the documentaries “Kuwayres, My Little Homeland” by Saeid Sadeqi and “The Last Supper” by Mohammad Qanefar, both coproduced by Iran and Syria.

The Iranian documentaries “Apostate Iranians” by Hamid Abdollahzadeh, “The Black Flag” by Majed Neisi and “Babai” by Mozaffar Hosseinkhani Hazaveh will also be screened.

Short films “From Hasakah with Love” by Mohammad Farahani, “Alan” by Mostafa Gandomkar, “August” by Ahmad Zaeri, Mohammad Esfandiari and Maria Moati, and “Kech” by Mehrdad Hassani, all from Iran, are also in the lineup.

“The Dark Wind”, a joint production of Iraq, Germany and Qatar by Hussein Hassan is the only feature film of this section of the festival, which will be held in Tehran from April 21 to 28.

“No regrets” says Mexican actress del Castillo of El Chapo interviewNEW YORK (Reuters) — When Mexican actress Kate del Castillo helped orchestrate a secret meeting between actor Sean Penn and drug lord Joaquin «El Chapo» Guzman in what became an explosive Rolling Stone article, little did she know she›d be drawing from the experience for her new Netflix series.

In «Ingobernable,» which debuted on Netflix last month, del Castillo, 44, plays a fictional first lady of Mexico on the run after she is framed for her husband›s murder.

«This is a woman who›s tried to prove her innocence. This is a woman who›s been persecuted by the government. This is a woman who›s been criticized or under scrutiny for something that she didn›t do wrong. She›s not a criminal, you know?» del Castillo told Reuters on Friday.

«I was treated like one in Mexico, in my country. All those things, she risked her life, she›s in danger, all of those things, I live them in mine.»

Del Castillo brokered an interview between Guzman, the boss of the Sinaloa drug cartel, and Penn in 2015, after the drug lord became interested in making a movie of his life. The interview was published in Rolling Stone in early 2016 and helped lead to the drug lord›s arrest.

Penn and del Castillo were not investigated directly by Mexican authorities, but the actress did say in a statement to Univision at the time that she believed the Mexican government «wants to destroy me.»

«I can tell you that I have no regrets at all,» del Castillo said, adding that she didn›t «see there is anything wrong» in trying to secure the rights to Guzman›s life story.

«It was risky of course, but at the end I›m an actress, a Latina woman living in another country, struggling still. And I›m going to go and reach out to the good stories when they›re there,» she added.

Art enthusiasts visit the seventh exhibit of the Sheed Photography Awards at the Iranian Artists Forum in Tehran on April 14, 2017.

(Honaronline/Alireza Farahani)