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THE FIRST ENGLISH LANGUAGE DAILY IN FREE KUWAIT Established in 1977 / www.arabtimesonline.com emergency number 112
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2013 / RABEE’A AL-THANI 7, 1434 AH
NO. 14966
52 PAGES
150 FILS
Bomb kills 79 people in Pakistan’s Quetta: police
A vendor sells colorful balloons at a park decorated with red lanterns in Beijing, Feb 16. Millions of people start to rush back to workplaces all over China when a week-long Lunar New Year holiday comes to an end. (AP)
‘Terrorism threatens us all’
‘We did it’
Saudi urges unity against terror threat
QUETTA, Pakistan, Feb 16, (RTRS): Seventynine people including school children died on Saturday in a bomb attack carried out by extremists from Pakistan’s Sunni Muslim majority, police said. A spokesman for Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a Sunni group, claimed responsibility for the bomb in Quetta, which caused casualties in the town’s main bazaar, a school and a computer centre. Police said most of the victims were Shiites. Burned school bags and books were strewn around. “The explosion was caused by an improvised explosive device fitted to a motorcycle,” said Wazir Khan Nasir, deputy inspector general of police in Quetta. “This is a continuation of terrorism against Shiites.”
RIYADH, Feb 16, (AFP): A senior Saudi official told an international conference on security on Saturday that the “terrorist” threat remains and urged global cooperation to combat it. “The danger of terrorism and terrorists still persists and affects several countries,” Prince Turki bin Mohammed al-Saud of the foreign ministry told delegates at the opening of the two-day event. “We must face up to it using all means and at all levels, local, regional and international. “Terrorism threatens us all, without exception,” Prince Turki said, calling for global action to “eradicate terrorist plans through coordination between specialised centres in the struggle against terrorism.” Some 50 countries are represented at the gathering in Riyadh, which has been organised in conjunction
with the United Nations. In 2005, Saudi Arabia proposed creating in its capital an international anti-terrorism centre, a proposal that was approved in September 2011 by the UN General Assembly. Riyadh has pledged to finance the centre for three years at a cost of $10 million (7.5 million euros). Between 2003 and 2006, the ultra-conservative Gulf kingdom was targeted by a wave of attacks claimed by the extremist al-Qaeda network, prompting a harsh crackdown by security forces. Al-Qaeda franchises remain active in the region, especially in Iraq and Yemen where the Saudi and Yemeni branches of the network have united to form al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Continued on Page 42
Details Page 13
ATTACK SUSPECTED TO HAVE ORIGINATED FROM CHINA
Hackers hit ‘Facebook’ Data not compromised SAN FRANCISCO/LOS ANGELES, Feb 16, (RTRS): Facebook Inc said on Friday hackers had infiltrated some of its employees’ laptops in recent weeks, making the world’s No.1 social network the latest victim of a wave of cyber attacks, many of which have been traced to China. It said none of its users’ data was compromised in the attack, which occurred after a handful of employees visited a website last month that infected their machines with so-called malware, according to a post on Facebook’s official blog released just before the ‘US can’t stop Tehran’ three-day US President’s Day weekend.
Iran not seeking ‘nuke’ weapons
TEHRAN, Feb 16, (AFP): Iran has no intention of developing nuclear weapons, but if it wanted to the United States could not thwart it, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Saturday. “We believe nuclear weapons must be abolished and we have no intention of building” such weaponry, Khamenei said in remarks posted on his website leader.ir. But, Khamenei said, “if Iran had such intentions, the US could in no way prevent it” from making an atomic bomb. The West and Israel suspect the Islamic republic is masking the development of an atomic weapons capability under the guise of a nuclear programme that Iran insists is purely peaceful. US President Barack Obama on Tuesday urged Tehran to “recognise that now is the time for a diplomatic solution” to the nuclear stand-off. “And we will do what is necessary to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon,” Obama said. Khamenei’s remarks come less than two weeks before a major meeting in Almaty on February 26 between Iran and six world powers — the United States, China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany — seeking to curb its nuclear activities.
“As soon as we discovered the presence of the malware, we remediated all infected machines, informed law enforcement, and began a significant investigation that continues to this day,” Facebook said. It was not immediately clear why Facebook waited until now to announce the incident. Facebook declined to comment on the reason or the origin of the attack. A security expert at another company with knowledge of the matter said he was told the Facebook attack appeared to have originated in China. The attack on Facebook, which says it has more than 1 billion members, underscores the growing threat of cyberattacks aimed at a broad variety of targets. Twitter, the microblogging social network, said earlier this month it had been hacked and that about 250,000 user accounts were potentially compromised, with attackers gaining access to information, including user names and email addresses. Newspaper websites, including those of The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, have also been infiltrated. Those attacks were attributed by the news organizations to Chinese hackers targeting coverage of China. Earlier this week, US President Barack Obama issued an executive order seeking better protection of the country’s critical infrastructure from cyber attacks. Facebook noted in its blog post that
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Photo by Anwar Daifallah
Children having fun during the Entertainment Festival for Kuwaiti families and people with disabilities at Souq Mubarakiya in Kuwait City. — See Page 2
Hundreds taken in tit-for-tat kidnappings
Syrian rebels press on offensive DAMASCUS, Feb 16, (AFP): Rebels pressed an offensive in northern Syria on Saturday, attacking Aleppo airport and two airbases, as a rights watchdog and residents reported hundreds of people held in a string of sectarian kidnappings. Regime troops fended off fierce rebel onslaughts around Aleppo international airport and the adjacent Nayrab military airbase, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. East of Aleppo, rebel attacks around the Kwiyres military airbase sparked counter-strikes from regime warplanes. The insurgents launched the “Battle of the airports” on Feb 12, and have since seized Al-Jarrah military airport and a military complex tasked with securing Aleppo’s civilian airport.
Rebels on Saturday also overran a military police checkpoint in the Golan Heights town of Khan Arnabeh just beyond the outer ceasefire line along the demilitarised zone bordering Israel, the Observatory said. Regime forces responded by shelling Khan Arnabeh and the nearby village of Jubata al-Khashab, inside the ceasefire zone, forcing a rebel retreat. The Israeli military said it had taken five Syrians wounded in clashes on the Golan to a hospital inside the Jewish state. An Israeli military spokeswoman said “soldiers provided medical care to five injured Syrians adjacent to the security fence” on the strategic plateau. The Golan has been tense since the near two-year Syrian uprising morphed into a bloody insurgency, at
Newswatch
‘Bill to naturalize 4,000 Bedouns will not pass’
MANAMA: Clashes broke out on Saturday at the funeral in Bahrain of a teenager killed in protests marking the second anniversary of a Shiite-led uprising, with police using tear gas against mourners, witnesses said. The security forces blocked access to Hussein al-Jaziri’s funeral in the Shiite-populated village of Daih near the capital Manama, firing tear gas and stun grenades to disperse dozens of people trying to push their way through. Jaziri, 16, died on Thursday after being shot in the stomach by security forces, according to Al-Wefaq, the main Shiite opposition bloc, during Shiite-led protests against the kingdom’s Sunni rulers in which a policeman was also killed. ❑ ❑ ❑
WASHINGTON: The Heart Attack Grill, the Las Vegas restaurant whose slogan proudly boasts that its arteryclogging fare is “worth dying for,” Continued on Page 42
times spilling over with mortar and gunfire into the Israeli-held zone but with serious escalation so far contained. Northwestern Syria has meanwhile fallen into a security vacuum, illustrated by reports on Saturday that more than 300 people were abducted in tit-for-tat kidnappings in 48 hours, the Britain-based Observatory and residents said. The spate of abductions, involving large numbers of women and children, began on Thursday when upwards of 40 civilians from majority-Shiite villages were kidnapped by armed groups in Idlib province. Hours later, more than 70 people from Sunni areas were seized in retaliation by gunmen from nearby Shiite villages. Subsequently, dozens more people
By Nihal Sharaf
and these lie at the heart of eruptions on the sun known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs). This is the first time scientists were able to discern the timing of a flux rope’s formation. (Blended 131 Angstrom and 171 Angstrom images of July 19, 2012 flare and CME). (AFP)
No increased cancer risk after IVF: study
KUWAIT CITY, Feb 16: The executive authority will reject a bill that proposes citizenship grants to 4,000 qualified Bedoun (stateless residents) in 2013 during its second deliberation this week, cited parliament sources on Saturday. During the first deliberation on Feb. 7, the bill was disapproved by all present ministers and a number of pro-government MPs who abstained from the vote. According to the sources, the Interior and Defense Affairs Committee is determined to pass the bill without any changes, but the executive authority said it believes only 2,000 persons who have the ‘Bedoun’ status should be granted citizenship this year, not the 4,000 persons urged by the bill.
NEW YORK, Feb 16, (RTRS): Women getting fertility treatments can be reassured that in vitro fertilization (IVF) does not increase their risk of breast and gynecological cancers, according to a new study of Israeli women. “The findings were fairly reassuring. Nothing was significantly elevated,” said lead author Louise Brinton, chief of the Hormonal and Reproductive Epidemiology Branch at the National Cancer Institute in Rockville, Maryland. Still, she added, “We should continue to monitor these women.” IVF treatments can involve ovulation-stimulating drugs or ovary puncturing to collect eggs — procedures that researchers have suspected may increase women’s risk of cancer.
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Arab Times Staff
This NASA image released Feb 15, shows magnetic loops on the sun, captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). It has been processed to highlight the edges of each loop to make the structure more clear. A series of loops such as this is known as a flux rope,
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