24 Mar 2013

CR IP TI ON BS SU

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

Clashes as Mikati’s resignation accepted

Pak Taleban threaten to send Musharraf to ‘hell’ on return

Messi magic leaves Argentina in charge

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Cyprus says ‘significant progress’ in bailout talks

Netanyahu apologizes to Erdogan for flotilla raid

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www.kuwaittimes.net

JAMADA ALAWWAL 12, 1434 AH

Obama ends Mideast trip in ‘spectacular’ Petra

Hunger-striking Gitmo Kuwaiti in poor health SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico: Lawyers for prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay said they are growing increasingly alarmed about the men’s health as a hunger strike expands at the US prison in Cuba. Attorney Carlos Warner met with a prisoner from Kuwait this week and says the man appears to have lost 25 pounds (11 kg). He said 35-year-old Fayez Al-Kandari was pale and could barely stand. Several other attorneys have reported similar accounts after meeting or speaking with prisoners in recent days. A prison spokesman says military doctors are closely monitoring the men’s weight and health. Navy Capt Robert Durand also says the strike has grown to 26 prisoners, up by five since Monday. Lawyers for the prisoners say many more are on strike in a protest over conditions at the prison and their indefinite detention. — AP

Kuwait holds 6 Iraq fishermen BASRA, Iraq: Kuwait has arrested at least six Iraqi fishermen and seized their boats for crossing into the state’s territorial waters, an Iraqi official told AFP yesterday. The group were arrested on Friday, according to Abed Ali Fadhel, head of the city council of Fao, a port town 535 km south of Baghdad. Kuwait’s coastguard often seizes Iraqi fishing boats and detains fishermen for illegal entry. The latest arrests come less than two months after Iraq approved a deal with Kuwait regulating the use of a shared waterway through which most of Baghdad’s oil exports flow, which Iraq had accused Kuwait of attempting to cut off. Control of the Khor Abdullah waterway is one of several outstanding issues between Iraq and Kuwait remaining from now-executed dictator Saddam Hussein’s August 1990 invasion of the state. — AFP

PETRA, Jordan: US President Barack Obama tours the Treasury in this ancient city yesterday. — AP

Max 28º Min 16º High Tide 10:46 & 21:33 Low Tide 04:18 & 15:57

AMMAN: US President Barack Obama strolled among the ancient Jordanian ruins at Petra yesterday, before heading home after a four-day Middle East tour dominated by his embrace of Israel. He also pulled off an unexpected coup, engineering a deal to restore diplomatic relations between estranged US allies Israel and Turkey, concluded in a tarmac telephone call at Tel Aviv airport before he departed for Jordan. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu apologised to Turkey and his counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan for a deadly raid on a Gaza aid flotilla and announced a full resumption of diplomatic ties as well as compensation to end a near three-year row.

The 30-minute call was made in trailer near the runway at Tel Aviv airport, where Obama and Netanyahu huddled before the president boarded Air Force One. Erdogan’s office said: “Our prime minister accepted the apology in the name of the Turkish people.” The Turkish leader said Netanyahu had told him restrictions on consumer goods reaching Gaza and the West Bank would also be lifted and pledged to seek Turkish help in improving humanitarian conditions in the Palestinian territories.

Yesterday, Obama flew by helicopter to view the rose-coloured stone ruins of the ancient Nabataean city, after winds from a sandstorm abated and allowed him to make the 55-minute trip across the rugged plains and mountains of Jordan. On Friday, high winds in Israel forced Obama to take his motorcade instead of his Marine One chopper to visit the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and there had been fears his jaunt to Petra would also be scrapped.

But Obama was able to spend two hours at the fabled tourist spot before returning to Amman, where Air Force One lifted off headed to Washington in the early afternoon. The US president, on the first foreign journey of his second term, had earlier emerged into a sunlit square facing the iconic Treasury building at Petra, carved out of the towering walls of sandstone in southern Jordan. “This is pretty spectacular,” Obama, in a blue windbreaker, sweater, khaki pants and sunglasses said, peering up at the rocky cliffs. “It’s amazing.”

Obama arrived at the ruins through a famous passageway squeezed between rock formations, and was led through the World Heritage Site by Dr Suleiman AlFarajat, a University of Jordan tourism professor. The visit to Petra, Jordan’s most visited tourist site, wrapped up Continued on Page 13

Men in White: Two popes meet

SEOUL: South Korean students hold an Earth Hour LED display during the 7th annual Earth Hour global warming campaign yesterday. — AFP

World landmarks go dark for Earth Hour SYDNEY: Iconic landmarks and skylines were plunged into darkness yesterday as the “Earth Hour” switch-off of lights around the world got under way to raise awareness of climate change. Sydney kicked off the event at 8.30 pm (0930 GMT ), cutting lights to cheers and applause from a small crowd who had gathered to see the skyline dim and Sydney Opera House turn a deep green to symbolise renewable energy.

Organisers expected hundreds of millions of people across more than 150 countries to turn off their lights for 60 minutes yesterday night - at 8:30 pm local time - in a symbolic show of support for the planet. “It’s really exciting,” said Jessica Bellamy, watching the event in Sydney. “It’s been a very inspiring night because it’s all about hope and change.”

Japan switched off soon after Australia, with the illumination on the landmark Tokyo Tower dimming down as

visitors were given the chance to pedal bicycles to generate power to illuminate an egg-shaped artwork. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial, a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site in the country’s west, also sat in darkness. In the Chinese capital Beijing, lights were shut off at the former Olympic stadium, the “Bird’s Nest”, while in the commercial hub of Shanghai buildings along the famed riverfront Bund took part. Some hotel guests in the city’s financial district were asked to respect the event and turn off lights in their rooms for an hour.

Hong Kong’s iconic skyline appeared to vanish into the night as the neon lights and advertising hoardings that usually brighten the sky were turned off, leaving the harbour in darkness. In Singapore a crowd of almost 1,000 people watched from a floating platform as landmarks on the skyline dimmed, before a pulsating musical performance Continued on Page 13

CASTEL GANDOLFO, Italy: Pope Francis flew in to a papal residence near Rome yesterday for a meeting with “pope emeritus” Benedict XVI - an unprecedented encounter in the history of the Catholic Church. Both men were in the white vestments reserved for popes as Benedict has been allowed to continue wearing his papal robes even after his resignation and is still addressed as “Your Holiness”. Francis took a helicopter to the lakeside Castel Gandolfo summer residence where Benedict has been living since stepping down last month.

Benedict came to greet him and Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi pointed out that in the car Francis sat on the right - “the classic place for the pope” - while Benedict sat on the left. In the palace chapel, Lombardi said Benedict had offered Francis the place reserved for popes but that the pontiff had turned it down saying “We are brothers”. They ended up kneeling side by side.

The talks round off a historic few weeks at the Vatican after Benedict became the first pope to resign in over 700 years and only the second to do so by choice in 2,000 years of Church history. The last pope to resign - Celestine V in 1294 - was locked up and perhaps killed off by his successor Boniface VIII. Continued on Page 13

CASTEL GANDOLFO, Italy: ‘Pope Emeritus’ Benedict XVI (right) greets Pope Francis upon his arrival at a heliport yesterday. — AFP

KUWAIT: Dark clouds loom over the Kuwait City skyline yesterday. — Photo by Yasser Al-Zayyat

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

LOCAL

New panel to regulate number of expats Drop in population of Kuwaitis KUWAIT: The government is considering setting up of a pentagonal committee, representing five branches of the state, to deal with the rising number expatriate laborers and work towards eliminating visa trafficking, a local newspaper reported yesterday quoting sources privy to the developments. Speaking to Al-Jarida on the condition of anonymity, a government insider said the panel proposed by the Interior Ministry would bring together the Migration General Department, the Public Authority for Civil Information, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, the Kuwait Municipality and the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor.

“The proposal has been studied by several internal committees after it was drafted a few months ago, and each study has so far recommended that it be implemented as it was the best solution to contain marginal workers and visa trade,” the sources said.

According to the source, the proposed system would help expose manipulations in the licensing mechanism and make sure that work permits are only granted after the company’s data is verified across the aforesaid five state departments. This would guarantee that files of

fake or inactive companies are not used to release work permits which are then sold to expatriate labor forces, thus illegally clearing their path to enter Kuwait.

The source said the proposal was likely to be reviewed by the cabinet “within a few weeks” to make a decision which would be temporary until the law to establish the Labor Public Authority, which the parliament passed in its first hearing, is implemented.

The news coincides with the release of a Supreme Council for Planning and Development report which indicated a drop in the population of Kuwaitis from 32.1 percent to 31.7 of the state’s total population. The statistics go against the government’s developmental plan that called for increasing the national population to 35 percent last year. The news also came less than a week after Minister of Social Affairs and Labor Thekra Al-Rashidi announced a new strategy aimed at reducing the number of foreign workers in Kuwait by 100,000 annually.

Meanwhile, the Higher Planning Council said the targets set in the last annual development plan about habilitating employees and encouraging Kuwaitis to avail of job options in the pri-

vate sector could not be met.

The council said in a report sent to the cabinet that the rate at which Kuwaitis were to be provided housing infrastructure actually went down and it hardly served the goals set in the development plan. It said one reason was that the number of Kuwaitis seeking government jobs increased because public sector bestows better advantages upon employees.

The council said a more permanent solution to the housing problem actually lay in larger participation by the private sector in executing housing projects.

The report said the Kuwaitis’ percentage among residents dropped from 32.1% to 31.7%, and attributed it to the rise in growth rate among non-Kuwaitis as compared with Kuwaitis.

It was not clear if the data reflected actual drop or a mere fluctuation in recording data as it was checked by the Public Authority for Civil Information (PACI) system. The targeted percentage of Kuwaitis was to be 35% at the completion of the development plan and this does not mean a drop in the natural growth rate of Kuwaitis as much as it reflected an increase in the number of expats.

Khadija Mouhajer

Kuwait hosts Medica Conference

Fire dept holds course to attract cadets

By Nawara Fattahova

By Hanan Al-Saadoun KUWAIT: The fire department organized a three-week-long course to attract prospective cadets for dealing with handling fires involving dangerous substances at Mubarak Al-Kabeer center. The course was part of the efforts to enhance the efficiency of fire centers in all Kuwait centers and learn deployment of latest scientific methods in fighting fires involving dangerous goods.

The course was being organized in the presence of Director General of Fire Department, Lt Gen Yousuf AlAnsari, and in cooperation with fire fighting colleagues from the United Kingdom.

Al-Ansari told reporters that the fire department was keen to keep pace with the developments in the domain and has formulated a strategic plan to develop human resources across all Kuwait governorates. He said the aim was to train the personnel at these centers for quickly responding to reports about fire and gain the ability to deal with accidents involving dangerous materials

till personnel with expertise arrive at the location.

Emphasizing that dealing with hazardous materials requires highly professional firefighters to prevent loss of life and material, acting deputy director Colonel Waleed AlAnsari said it was the fourth course of its kind.

He said the cadets were being imparted training under the supervision of specialist trainers from the United Kingdom who were experts in dealing with hazardous substances. He said the training matched international standards.

A number of officers and personnel from all governorates and fire centers were involved with the course which will witness personnel being trained in dealing with accidents involving dangerous materials.

The participant teams carried out a drill at the Mubarak Al-Kabeer fire center to fight a fire in a truck loaded with dangerous goods. The drill was supervised by trainers Jeff and Martin from the UK. Al-Ansari hailed the participating groups and exhorted them to achieve the highest level

KUWAIT: The fire drill in progress at the Mubarak Al-Kabeer fire center. of readiness to deal with such exigencies.

The drill was attended by Director General Lt. General Yousuf Al-Ansari.

C’wealth Day celebrated KUWAIT: Ambassadors from a number of Commonwealth countries in Kuwait met on Thursday at the residence of the Ambassador of the United Kingdom to Kuwait, Frank Baker. The ambassadors discussed how Commonwealth countries could work together and what more could be done to improve links between the Commonwealth and Kuwait.

It was also noted that links between Kuwait and Commonwealth countries are already very strong.

Kuwait has close historic links with the UK since well before the signing of the 1899 treaty by Mubarak the Great. Trade between Kuwait and Pakistan and India goes back even further. The Kuwait Fund operates in a number of Commonwealth countries.

Kuwait has long been active in Africa, which contains a strong contingent of Commonwealth countries, and has observer status at the African Union.

Hundreds of thousands of expatriate workers from Commonwealth countries live side by side with their Kuwaiti friends and coworkers. Australia, Canada, the UK and New Zealand are popular destinations for Kuwaiti students.

However the discussion focussed on how these links could be improved perhaps through using pan-Commonwealth organisations like the Commonwealth Business Council to create links between businesses, or some of the charitable and youth organisations to foster cultural exchange and youth partnership. All agreed that this work should be taken forward as appropriate and in cooperation with officials and civil society in Kuwait.

KUWAIT: The Ministry of Health held the 4th Kuwait Medica Conference and Exhibition at the Crowne Plaza Hotel from March 19 to 21. It was one of the biggest healthcare events in Kuwait, as many hospitals, clinics, medical centres and companies related to healthcare and medicine took part in it.

Khadija Mouhajer, Director of International Relations of HCA International and the International Marketing Team of HCA International, attended this exhibition. Mouhajer stated that HCA International was the largest private hospital group, with six world-class hospitals located in and around Central London: London Bridge Hospital, The Lister Hospital, The Princess Grace Hospital, The Portland Hospital, The Harley Street Clinic and The Wellington Hospital.

Furthermore, HCA International has a unique partnership with the NHS located at UCLH, Queen’s Hospital Romford and Christie’s in Manchester.

Additionally it operates Leaders in Oncology Care (LOC) in Harley Street and Sarah Cannon Research Institute (SCRI), one of the largest clinical research organizations.

HCA International keeps investing in modernizing and improving its facilities, such as the newly refurbished Paediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) at The Harley Street Clinic, which boasts an internationally recognized specialist team of paediatric consultants - along with the renowned cardiology department of Harley Street, which specializes in the treatment of cardiac conditions, particularly congenital heart disease and has a committed team of experts that attract some of the finest specialist consultants from many of London’s major teaching hospitals, all dedicated to the well-being and comfort of babies and children in their care.

“Congenital heart conditions are relating to problems with the heart’s structure and function that are present at birth. These conditions need the finest immediate and continuous care,” she further said.

That London Bridge Hospital also

under went renovation and it increased the number of ITU beds from 10 to 16, with state-of-the-art technical equipment and an expert multidisciplinary team.

The Wellington Hospital has recently launched the Wellington Platinum Medical Centre. Located just minutes from the main hospital, the Platinum Medical Centre is an extensive outpatient and diagnostic facility, incorporating outpatient and day care surgical theatres across seven floors.

“Equipped with the most advanced and sophisticated imaging and diagnostic technology, the centre has been designed to bring all services together into one building. The centre offers various services such as imaging - including digital radiology, 31 MRI, PET/CT and ultrasound, day-care chemotherapy unit - in partnership with Leaders in Oncology Care, Day Surgery Unit, including the minor procedures suite, outpatient appointments system, 50 consulting rooms, and private GPs,” Khadija noted. “This ultra-modern centre is the largest facility of its kind in the UK,” she pointed out.

Mrs Khadija Mouhajer said The Portland Hospital for Women and Children continues to increase paediatric rehabilitation services, where patients from all over the Middle East and other countries undergo treatment. The Portland Hospital is also getting known for treating patients for Global Development Delay (GDD).

“The GDD is a term used to describe individuals, usually children, who have delayed achievement of most, if not all, developmental milestones,” she added.

Khadija Mouhajer and the International Marketing Team Mohamed Hashem from London Bridge, Troy Coldrick and Ilham Mohamed from The Wellington Hospital and Nada Tarhami - would like to thank Dr Nasser Al Onaizi and his team for organizing the 4th Kuwait Medica exhibition, which saw high attendance and was beneficial for all exhibitors and the Government of Kuwait. On behalf of HCA International, we wish Dr Nasser Al Onaizi success and prosperity.

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

LOCAL

More govt support needed to boost hotel industry New hotels set to come up

By Ben Garcia

Dr. Labeeba Al-Tamimi, Layla Al-Ghanim and Sheikh Intisar Al-Sabah

KUWAIT: Sheikha Intisar Al-Sabah explaining “pick a lemon” activity to one of the guests.

Initiative launched to spread positivity in Kuwait

By Nawara Fattahova KUWAIT: Sheikha Intisar Salem Al-Ali AlSabah launched ‘Alnowair’, a nonprofit initiative founded by her, on the first ever International Day of Happiness on March 20, 2013.

The initiative, aimed at spreading positivity in Kuwait, was the first by any GCC country and came as part of Kuwait’s participation in the celebrations of the International Day of Happiness as recognized by the United Nations in June 2012 and supported by 193 UN Member states.

The day was celebrated by millions of people around the world.

The initiative was launched through a four-day exhibition held in a rundown building in Salmiya where people experienced that happiness lies in small things and deeds.

The invitees gave each other flowers, created collages together, wrote about all the big and little things that they felt thankful for and shared them with others, resolved to let go of a grudge or a worry and undertook many such activities.

Marking the launch of the celebrations, Sheikha Intisar Salem Al-Ali Al-Sabah said, “The UN aims to inspire a 100 million people through the International Day of Happiness and we hope to have at least one million of those from Kuwait.”

Alnowair is a five-year initiative aimed at inculcating a positive attitude among the people in Kuwait through events, exhibitions, activities, seminars, workshops and

campaigns. “It plans to communicate simplified and scientifically proven data about the benefits of a positive attitude towards life. The data, obtained from respected institutions such as Harvard and Berkeley etc, includes practices that the people in Kuwait can easily follow. Alnowair also plans to create a grassroots movement by engaging, enlightening and inspiring the youth of Kuwait through multiple programs, independent initiatives and projects,” she added.

“We were told, ‘smile and the world smiles at you.’ Science has now proven the validity of that proverb. We are a non-profit initiative that has vowed to spread positive attitude in Kuwait, an attitude we believe can become a way of living and lead to fulfillment and happiness. Furthermore, Harvard research has proven that having a positive outlook is a choice and our mission is to make people aware of this simple fact and inspire them to act on it,” noted Sheikha Intisar.

Alnowair envisages inspiring people to be more positive through campaigns, social media, events, exhibitions and many other activities. “We plan to bring resources from all over the world and through proven methods and ideologies connect the people of Kuwait with the experts in the field of happy living and positivity,” stressed Campaign Manager at Alnowair, Gaya Kruchlik. More information about Alnowair can be found on their website www.alnowair.com or on the Facebook, Instagram accounts and YouTube channels @al_nowair.

KUWAIT: Hotel industry is a growing business all over the world, as also in Kuwait, but an industry insider said it required government help to sustain such a lucrative business. Speaking with the Kuwait Times, the General Manager of The Regency Hotel, Aurelio P. Giraudo, said the government had little option but to diversify and work hard to attract tourists. “Creating more tourist attractions such as entertainment facilities, easing the visas, enabling new airports to handle bigger aircrafts and enhancing capacities are just some of our recommendations,” he said.

“People outside Kuwait still think we are at war with our neighbours and that we are very narrow minded people although the truth is the opposite. People here are free. We enjoy freedom here, but few know about it. We need to change people’s perception outside Kuwait. I believe that if the government was to spend on advertising Kuwaiti tourism potential, the sector will definitely attract much larger number of visitors,” he added.

Giraudo admitted that in the next couple of months, new hotels were set to come up and compete with already existing facilities but the number of customers was likely to remain the same. “I would say that the new hotels will definitely impact us. We are a small country and we know that we can be affected, but we are optimistic that while other hotels can attract clients, The Regency Hotel is different,” he noted.

“Our hotel is considered the best five star hotel in Kuwait. We have the best location, and with new hotels coming up on the firmament, we will even be more competitive, more alert and promise to deliver excellent services. The hotel industry is growing but this growth also posed a challenge to the government because we need new airports to accommodate larger traffic and make more business available for tourism by next year or so. The hotel accommodation is fine but Kuwait needs to move forward and help the hotel industry,” Geraudo added.

The Regency Hotel is known to offer clients a wonderful experience upon arrival, boasts of spacious rooms, high quality and creatively flavorsome cuisine, spectacular ballrooms and conventions facilities, unbeatable sea views and wonderful outdoor relaxation areas.

Just recently, The Regency Hotel announced the arrival of another unbeatable hotel service called “The Executive Experience at the Regency.”

At a press conference last week, Geraudo said that the hotel regularly introduces such activities as it tried to reintroduce its services to local and international clients. “Our strategy at The Regency is very clear; we position the hotel as

the leading five-star hotel in Kuwait, capturing all the luxury and glamour within the city to ensure that The Regency remains the hotel of choice for government and corporate guests as well as society weddings and global conventions,” he said.

The history of the hotel is well known to many, according to Geraudo. “Thirty years ago, the vision of one man created The Regency and through good times and bad, the hotel has built a reputation by delivering excellent service and coming up as a fantastic product,” he enthusiastically said. “The commitment of owners has been continually tested and equally continually confirmed and reconfirmed as the property was redeveloped and refurbished following the destruction of the early 1990s. In 2009, the new Regency was revealed, placing the hotel next to all the iconic hotels in top capital cities throughout the world featuring white Italian marble that

The Regency is now growing and maturing into the most elegant, sophisticated luxury hotel in Kuwait. This has now been recognized as we mark our 100th day as the recognized #1 hotel in the city through the guests’ review based website TripAdvisor.com. The Regency is the only hotel in Kuwait to have been awarded a TripAdvisor Award of Excellence,” he said, justifiably gushing and with pride writ large on his face.

He also announced unveiling of two exciting new projects’ branding and was assisted by Director of Sales and Marketing, Russell Loughland, who explained many more details.

Giraudo is an Italian-born with 30 years of experience in the hotel industry across the globe.

In 2010, he played a key role in organizing the World Economic Forum’s first ever summit held in Morocco while working as Area Manager for

KUWAIT: Aurelio P. Giraudo, the Regency Hotel General Manager (right) poses here with Russell Loughland Director of Sales and Marketing. —Photo by Yasser Al-Zayyat has become a permanent feature of the dÈcor. Palmeraie in Marrakech. Giraudo previously The public areas and bedrooms were fully worked as Group Corporate Director of Food and redesigned,” he said. As part of the heritage of Beverage and General Manager of the Imperial Kuwait, The Regency wants to captivate local and Hotels Group in Thailand, and headed the GCC guests and let them enjoy a flavor of Kuwaiti Imperial Angkor Palace Hotel in Cambodia, now hospitality with international standards. known as Le MÈridien Angkor. He was also “We do not compete with branded chain appointed as General Manager by Four Seasons, hotels as we have more freedom away from the Taipei and spent some years in Bangkok with the constraints of corporate office to be the leader Fairmont Group as General Manager of Nailert and innovator which enables the hotel to contin- Park Bangkok, a SwissÙtel. Prior to his appointuously develop new programs. From new corpo- ment at The Regency Kuwait, he was General rate programs to our Ladies’ Lounge, from new Manager of Best Western Premier Dua Sentral, restaurants to creative retail outlets, from Wi-Fi in Kuala Lumpur - the flagship hotel for Luxury our limousines to our improved Fitness Studios, Collection in Malaysia.

Water crisis predicted next summer KUWAIT: Kuwait is expected to face water shortage next summer, based on comparisons between the estimated average daily production and consumption rates, a local newspaper reported yesterday quoting government sources.

Speaking to Al-Jarida on the condition of anonymity, the sources said the Ministr y of Electricity and Water believed it would most likely not be able to enhance production levels sufficiently to meet the increasing demand in the next few months. “ The crisis is predictable because of the delay in the ministry’s plans about increasing water production,” the sources said.

They added that water desalination plants can produce a maximum of 500 million imperial gallons every day when functioning at full capacity, but this fell far short of the 550 million daily consumption rate predicted for the summer, especially during the month of May. The ministry was barely able to keep up with consumption levels last year with a daily average of 460 million gallons produced and 454 million gallons consumed. “ The ministry resorts to the state’s strategic reserves in case of shortage, but even that is not expected to help avoid shortage during next summer in the light of the MEW’s strate-

gy which calls for taking not more than 40 million gallons a day,” the sources said.

Faced with this dilemma, the sources believe that the only option the ministry can resort to in order to avoid a water crisis was a ‘rationing system’ as per which scheduled cuts could be applied if consumption continued to rise during the summer.

The latter option was a likely scenario if malfunctions occurred in desalination plants that affected daily production, the sources added. Moreover, they predicted an increase in the price of water sold by tankers from an average of KD5 to KD10 per load to as much as

KD30. Kuwait has one of the world’s highest water consumption rates at 500 liters per capita, which is considerably higher than the average global rate that ranges between 100 and 200 liters.

Most of the countr y ’s water needs are supplied by desalination of the Arabian Gulf waters.

In other news, Al-Anba newspaper reported yesterday that the cabinet referred to the parliament the draft laws pertaining to establishment of four shareholding companies to generate electricity and desalinate water, a first step in plans for privatizing power plants as per the state’s development plan.

Arab summit to create jobs for youth

Massive blaze in Mahboula

By Hanan Al-Saadoun KUWAIT: Firefighters from ten fire centers fought a massive blaze in a nine-storey building in Mahboula area spread over 1000 square meters, and brought it under control even as two of their colleagues were hurt during the operation, one of suffocation and the other when something fell on his back. While firefighters were able to evacuate all the residents from the building, some vehicles including cars and motorcycles were gutted in the fire that started in the basement but then spread upwards engulfing one after the other floor. Firemen received the first distress call at 5:00 pm and immediately, personnel from Mangaf, Fahaheel and technical center proceeded to the site.

Since the building was huge and fire was spreading fast, they called other fire centers to help fight the blaze.

Among the centers that eventually participated in operations were Al-Qurain, AlZour, Mina Abdullah, Al-Madina, Al-Salmiya, Farwaniya and support fire centers.

Firefighters used external ladders, foam and air propelling equipment to help clear the smoke. The owner of the building seemed to have violated several safety norms to make some quick money. The two firemen affected by the fire were taken to hospital for treatment. The acting deputy fire director,

Colonel Waleed Al-Anjari, who supervised the fire fighting operation, told reporters that the owner of the building violated safety conditions by closing the doors leading to the stairs and using the space for storage in a poor way which left little room for the firefighters to move and thus hindered the evacuation process and airing.

DOHA: The next Arab Summit, in Doha next week, will create new horizons for new jobs for the Arab youth, particularly in small and mediumsize enterprises (SMEs), a Kuwaiti official said Friday.

“We are working very hard that doors are open for the Arab youth to get the financing for these (SME) projects in order to make good use of their potentials in their countries to be the driving force for their economies,” Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Mustafa Al-Shimali told KUNA after a meeting of the Arab Economic and Social Council (ESC).

Al-Shimali called for economic integration among Arab countries. He said ministers at ESC meeting discussed the economic file of the Doha summit.

The ministers, he added, discuss the grand Arab free trade zone and how the Arab countries complete the executive program of the zone, in order to move to the next stage which would be the Arab custom union. Al-Shimali said the biggest hurdle was to make certificate of origin compatible with the detailed certificates of origin.

Earlier at the beginning of the meeting, Qatari minister of finance Yusuf Kamal said the grand Arab free trade zone should be the top priority in the quest for economic integration.

He said the Arab custom union should be launched in 2015, a matter that would make the region an influential player in global trade and economy. Economic integration, said Kamal, meant that Arab countries should pay attention to agriculture development and food security.

Kamal said the ESC meeting was held amidst political and economic challenges in the region.

He called on Arab countries to pay more attention to social affairs, fighting illiteracy, sustainable agriculture development and upgrading status of women. — KUNA

Jahra Road project opens new detour KUWAIT: The supervising authority undertaking the Jahra Road Development project, one the largest transport infrastructure projects worldwide, yesterday announced the opening of a new detour in the project’s third phase t on Friday evening. The detour is located on Jahra road and starts after the Muhammad Ibn Al-Qasim roundabout ending at the Jahra - Ghazali intersection. This new road is temporary and will comprise three lanes in both directions with a total length of 600 meters.

The Project Engineer, Eng. Yasser Budastour stated that the main objective of the detour is to reroute the traffic on construction site in order to create more workspace for the establishment for the construction of bridges and other structures, in addition to road and utility operations.

“The Traffic Authority verified all security and safety conditions present for the approval and issued all the necessary permits to open the temporary road” added Eng. Budastour.

Yasser Budastour

Addressing Jahra Road users, Engineer Yasser Budastour said: “With extending sincere apologies for any inconvenience this detour may cause; we ask all drivers to use caution while driving within the construction area and abide by all traffic guidelines to secure road safety for them and the project’s construction workers”.

The project is located in the western region of Kuwait, which extends from the Jahra Gate (Jahra Gate Roundabout Sheraton) to the United Nations Roundabout. It is also one of the main projects in the Ministry of Public Works’ strategic plan to develop roads and motorways in the State of Kuwait in order to address the future demand of traffic, minimize traffic congestions and improve road safety.

The MPW formulated agreements with Louis Berger in collaboration with the Pan Arab Consulting Engineers as project design and supervision consultants and the Arab Contractors Company (ACC) - Othman Ahmad Othman as the project contractor.

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

LOCAL kuwait digest

kuwait digest

Poisonous food stuff

Politicians who keep on lying

By Dr Ghanim Al-Najjar

By Aziza Al-Mufarej

A

ccording to the Machiavellian principle, ends justify the means, and politicians or rulers can do anything to achieve their own interests even if the means are not entirely legal or involve questionable morals. In fact, for some politicians, lying is not exactly something abominable if it helps achieve certain goals that they believe would benefit the society.

So, the Machiavellian saying does not apply to them.

In this regard, a British politician once said that he does not practice lying in politics but rather economizes on truth. Another said he believed that the best way to lie is to tell half-truths.

Professor John J. Mearsheimer of the United States, a well known realist thinker on foreign policy, published a book titled Why Leaders Lie (2011) in which he analyzed lying in international relations, naturally focusing on the United States. Mearsheimer had courted a great deal of controversy when he published a daring book titled The Israeli Lobby (2007) which made him a target of severe attack by the Zionist lobby and its supporters who later published a counter-book titled The Arab Lobby in a bid to balance the annoying effect of his book on the Israeli lobby’s operation in the US. Having read both books, I found out that Mearsheimer’s was a rational and scientific research while the one raising the bogey of Arab lobby came across as a feeble attempt, full of wrong information and partisan analysis.

Mearsheimer’s new book on lying cites many examples from the Middle East, Israel and America while analyzing international relations. It is actually a major contribution towards undermining political lying. In fact, I am seriously considering translating the book soon so that it can be become accessible to wider sections of public.

One of the best examples of political lying that is being constantly practiced is the way the war on Iraq and the need to topple Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship was promoted. That regime was finally toppled in March 2003, and the event’s tenth anniversary is being commemorated now. Top politicians led that propaganda campaign and were assisted by some media tycoons such as David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, Bill Kristol, Christopher Hitchens and others all of whom made the war possible.

Without those, the Bush-Cheney duo could have found it rather hard to launch that completely motivated-by-lies war.

The good thing about America is that analysis and criticism never stops whenever a disaster, a tragedy or a malfunction takes place, which is completely the opposite of what happens with our politicians who keep lying, justifying, denying and insisting to live through a big lie because they, themselves, are probably nothing but a big lie! —Al-Jarida

I

kuwait digest

Who actually succeeded?

By Ibrahim Al-Awadhi

M

onths have passed since the parliament was elected but we are yet to see signs of any improvement in the political scene. In the meantime, speculations continue about the future of the opposition on one hand and the government’s unyielding stance on the single-vote system on the other. The most common question perhaps is whether the government has been able to overcome the crisis created by the backlash to the single-vote draft law, except on a temporary basis. Has the opposition failed to achieve its demands which, I believe, are legitimate?

Personally, I think that the opposition has failed to focus on its demands and agree on one optimum method to achieve these. The reason why I believe the government has not been able to overcome the crisis is because it has yet to achieve anything that meets public expectations, be it measures to protect public funds, improvement in services, building new projects etc.

The biggest ‘accomplishment’ for the government so far has been the debt relief scheme, which was only a way to distract the people from the real critical crises.

The opposition today needs to reassess and regroup. For example, it has to break free from the idea which links it to 33 members who formed a majority in the erstwhile parliament and subsequently became known as the Majority Bloc. None of these personalities or the statements they make should be a decisive factor in the opposition’s main focus. The opposition is

also required to reconsider its leaders’ political speeches and the way they express their point of view. A number of processions and rallies they convened were met with public frustration simply because they were not in line with the society’s traditions.

I can almost say for certain that there are a good number of people, myself included, who agreed with everything that was said when the grand Opposition Coalition came into being, mainly about moving towards a full political system, rejecting restrictions on freedoms and raising demands about dissolution of the current parliament. However, many of us feel frustrated with the way the opposition chose to deliver its message to the decision makers. Some of the activities that we did not appreciate were processions that were organized in residential areas during late night hours and calls for general strike.

Therefore, I believe that the opposition’s approach needs to change. We noticed that the only thing that has changed so far is the name of the opposition’s movement from being a ‘group’ to become a ‘force’ and now a ‘coalition’. As we find ourselves at crossroads today, what we desperately need is hope, a little bit of patience and a good deal of cleverness.

History says that people’s struggle requires more patience and tireless work carried out through peaceful, proper and legal means until the desired goals are reached.—Al-Rai

kuwait digest

‘Debt relief’ achievement

buy kabab only from one restaurant about which I am confident about the good quality of meat because it is on display right in front of the customers. I cannot eat the kabab at other restaurants without harboring doubts about its source.

Most of the time, I hardly find it tasty and do not enjoy it. On such occasions, I rather opt for a piece of bread, some cheese and a slice of cucumber, all of it much safer for health.

Gone are the good times when eating meat in restaurants was not a problem in Kuwait as municipality supervisors were still to be initiated into corrupt ways and its inspectors prevented cheating and had a conscience that did not allow them to cheat or let consumers be fed on poisonous food stuff. No amount of bribes could keep them silent and no benefits could paralyze their hands when it came to stopping bad practices.

Of course, all that has changed since money has become everything. Greed now controls some people’s weak will who then turn a blind eye towards what goes on under their nose.

Woebegone are those whose religion and morals do not keep them from cheating people and compromising with people’s health.

I saw an ad in a paper that was very enticing as delicious looking kabab chunks covered with red summak spread over some Iranian bread, surrounded by halved lemons, onion wings and roasted tomatoes and what have you enticing you to hurry and order it. Well, that is exactly what I did after a strong urge overtook me.

The order arrived and I placed the bag on the table and opened it, but then doubts crept into my head and I began to examine the kabab pieces and meat, thinking about its origin and what was in it. I was examining it so that I could find its nationality, aided by my sixth sense, so that I can go about my business which was to relish it.

Something kept telling me that it was meat from cows that died for a certain reason and it was exported to us from India and Africa. A little later I thought it was meat from stray dogs and cats or even sick sheep sold cheap as was the case in an Um Al-Haiman restaurant. Soon, I found myself thinking that the meat was from horses and donkeys that had grown old and that could no longer work and were therefore butchered and their meat exported to us as livestock meat.

How else was I to explain why the meat was crumbling and coming out as brittle even before I put it on the bread. In short, I did not feel comfortable about that kabab, especially since I had ordered it from that restaurant for the first time. I do not deny that the nationality of the workers in that restaurant was the main reason because how could I be comfortable with people for whom cheating was a way of life and ran through their veins like blood. I tried to convince myself that I was wrong and that the restaurant is clean, its workers are honorable, and the municipality inspector that checks on them is honest, but I failed. Eventually, I took out the food and made sure it was fed to the cats because they are animals whose minds were not afraid and who did not doubt everything even in such bad times. — Al-Watan

By Dr Wael Al-Hasawi

I

feel ashamed about having to write yet again about the issue concerning the writing off of interest accrued on the loans, but I cannot stop wondering why MPs have insisted on pushing this subject every day since 2006? And why is it that some lawmakers continue to give it priority as if the fate of the state’s economy hangs by it?

It seems that the government is willing to approve the debt relief now after having rejected the idea for years. In my opinion, the step is nothing more than an attempt to improve the image of the parliament and convince the public that it has achieved what its predecessors failed to accomplish - even if the cost was KD1.6 billion paid from the state’s treasury (according to the Central Bank governor).

Several MPs have already started singing the praises of the debt relief scheme which they said will bring many benefits that include a KD1000 grant for every Kuwaiti who was not covered by the bailout plan. It later turned out that the grant was only a ‘wish’ they hoped to be granted by HH the Amir. They also made people believe that the debt relief will cover the loans taken from Islamic banks.

This seemed extremely difficult because these banks followed a system in which borrowers are not charged usury interests as was the case with the conventional banks.

The KD1000 grant was pitched as an idea to deflect speculation about the inequality of the debt relief. But that does not seem to be the case when we calculate the average amount that each of the 66,000 debtors as per official statistics will obtain.

In that case, we will be talking about an average of KD24,000 per debtor.

Moreover, several religious scholars including Shaikh Ujail Al-Nashmi and Shaikh Khalid AlMathkour explained that it is illegal as per the Sharia Law for the state to purchase the usury interests of bank loans. However, it seems that these opinions were neglected and even ridiculed by many despite the clarity of the scholars’ arguments.

These arguments were based on lack of equality as well as purchase of usury interests.

I had previously commended Finance Minister Mustafa Al-Shamali for his bold step to oppose the proposed debt relief, but it seems that he had to bow down before MPs’ demands. The same bold step was also taken by the Central Bank’s governor, but I cannot blame him since the government failed to respond to his pleas and it was not him who made the political decision to write off the interests. — Al-Rai

kuwait digest

Politics becomeS a door to fame

By Thaar Al-Rashidi

I

think that we are the only country in the world in which a politician enjoys fame just like an artist, a singer or a football player. In fact, politicians in this country are more famous than poets, writers and painters. This is a rather upside down equation. I do not think that it happens in any country in the world the way it is happening here.

The politician here is not only someone who has a political post. In its Kuwaiti sense, the term politician denotes every person who talks about politics and makes a declaration or two in the daily newspapers. Some of these worthies, who describe themselves as “political activists”, enjoy fame similar to football players abroad, although all that they do is nothing except make declarations every now and then irrespective of whether the issue at hand has any importance.

Politics here has become for some a door to fame, and this is what has reversed the fame equation for politicians and real achievers in other fields.

Kuwait is not all about politics and this fame equation must be straightened out. Things should be normalized and every one of us must revert to our own area of specialization.

The doctor must go back to his clinic, and the MP must go back to his office and council work.

Similarly, the engineer needs to return to his designs and the university teacher is required to focus again on teaching his students. The lawyers in Kuwait must go back to their files and cases, and all normal people must go back to their work.

If all of us were to become politicians, activists or start belonging to certain parties or groups, we will not have any growth. There is a saying that goes like this: “If poverty comes from the door, love will escape from the window.” Let me just tweak it a little bit, and it would remain still as valid for us in Kuwait: “If politics enters from the door, growth will escape from the windows.”

• The smallest corruption case in the mega projects in the country deserves to be treated like a state security case. — Al-Anbaa

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

LOCAL

—Photos by Yasser Al-Zayyat

10,000 participate in NBK walkathon

By Nawara Fattahova KUWAIT: More than 10,000 people participated in the annual walkathon of the National Bank of Kuwait (NKB) yesterday.

This year the walkathon did not have a slogan; it was left to the participants to walk for their reasons and beliefs. The participants were luckier this year. The weather was not so hot, so it was easier to walk.

Besides, there was a light drizzle during the walkathon.

This year, too, the NBK decided to give away two cars (MG 2013) as prizes. The two lucky winners were picked from a draw of coupons filled by the participants and placed in the boxes at the beginning of the race. The draw took place at the finish point in Green Island during the evening.

“The winner must be present here at the celebrations during the draw. And if he or she doesn’t come on stage within five minutes, we will pull out another coupon,” Zeina Al-Humaidhi, PR staff at NBK, told

the Kuwait Times yesterday.

More people participated in the walkathon this year, compared with the past year. “The number is between 10,000 and 15,000 - we don’t have the exact number yet. I think more people participated this time around because we made it all open, with each participant walking for their own cause. Some walked for breast cancer, some for diabetes, and others for health and fitness. Various participants had various causes,” stressed Mariam Al-Qatami, PR staff at NBK. The walkathon included three categories of people - kids, women, and men - from various nationalities. Each of these categories had four subcategories. The walkathon started in the morning with the kids categories at Green Island.

The participating kids - between 5-14 years of age - were divided into four subcategories, based on their age, and were identified by the colour of their jerseys (yellow, red, green, and blue). They only walked

within the Green Island.

The walking distance was different for each of the three categories. The kids (Zeina Friends Club) walked for 1km only, starting at 10 am. The last subcategory of kids (12-14 year-olds) walked for 2 km. The women walked for 6 km, starting at 2:15 pm from the Marina Crescent, while the men walked for 8 km, and started at 3 pm from the Scientific Centre (Ras Al-Salmiya). All categories finished the walkathon at the Green Island. The women participants were also divided into four subcategories. At 2:15 pm the women dressed in light-blue colour (aged 15-20) were flagged off from the Marina Crescent. They were followed by the women in yellow group (aged 21-35) at 2:30 pm. And then the third and fourth categories in red (aged 36-49) and pink (aged 50 and above) got started at 2:45 pm.

The men started at 3 pm from the Scientific centre, starting with the eldest category, and the youngest category got set to go at 3:30 pm. The men, too, were divid-

Large quantity of banned Asian drugs caught

By A. Saleh KUWAIT: The Director of Medicines Inspection Control at the Ministry of Health, Dr. Jaber Al-Khalidi, said an inspection team caught a large quantity of banned Asian aphrodisiac drugs that were not registered with his Ministry.

The inspectors also caught weight loss drugs and tea containing internationally banned cytobromine as it can

cause damage to human brain and could even turn out to be fatal. The drugs were found in a Jahra store. AlKhalidi said some smuggled cortisone drugs from Saudi Arabia and Syria and skin bleaching substances were also confiscated. Appropriate legal action was taken against the store owner.

MP queries delay Member of Parliament Yaqoub AlSane asked minister of commerce and

industry about the delay is preparing the executive rules of decreed law 25/2013 on new companies law.

He said “why the executive rules of the law 25/2012 are not issued so far, and what if the period eclipse the six months period stipulated by law, and what is the situation with companies that did not correct their status during this period, if the executive rules are not issued during the legal period.

New Gitmo guards ‘stubborn’ KUWAIT: Families of two Kuwaiti detainees in Guantanamo, Fayez AlKandari and Fawzi Al-Ouda, made two calls through the internet on Wednesday which were arranged by the International Red Cross Committee. Each call lasted for about an hour.

The chairman of the popular committee for the defence of Gitmo detainees, Khalid AlOuda, told the local newspaper Al-Watan that his son Fawzi seemed unable to concentrate during the call due to the poor treatment he received at the detention center. He said Fayez Al-Kandari and Fawzi Al-Ouda were still on hunger strike and lost a lot of weight and their health was further deteriorating. Al-Ouda said, “The current strike in Gitmo is considered the largest since the opening of this ill-reputed center as detainees are demanding that guards must not touch the Holy Quran during inspection.”

He said new guards of the center were being considered as even more violent and stubborn as they were brought from war zones around the world and had no sense of any humanitarian issues. He said, “I do not know if those guards, who are full of grudges and hatred, were brought intentionally or just by accident.”

He said it was clear that Fawzi was disoriented when he was talking and was absent minded because of malnutrition. “We are worried about his safety as well as that of Fayez Al-Kandari,” he said.

ed into four categories: dark blue (aged 1520), white (aged 21-35), green (aged 36-49), and burgundy (aged 50 and above).

At the finish point (Green Island), different activities were held. Just like last year, this year also saw the draw for the Jawhara Account winners being held there. KD 250,000 was the quarterly prize, in addition to the monthly, and weekly prizes of Jawhara. “This final celebration is broadcasted live on social media such as Twitter, Facebook and others. Furthermore, different TV channels and radio stations are broadcasting it. We are glad to see such a huge audience witness this event,” added Zeina Al-Humaidhi.

Then 10 winners from each single category were presented awards and also received cash prizes. Then, the draw for declaring the winners of the two MG 2013 vehicles was held. In addition, different entertainment activities were held and prizes given away to the attendees. A local band played live music at the theatre and

performed various folk and modern songs.

The celebration was concluded with fireworks. The participants praised the organization of this walkathon. Thirty-eight-yearold Ibtisam Saeid, who was participating in the event for the first time, said she liked the atmosphere. “I’m a little lazy, so I wasn’t very excited to walk. But my friend encouraged me and insisted that I join her in the walkathon. So I came, and I’m glad I did so and finished the walkathon without being tired. I know I did something good for my body. It’s nice that they provide free bus transfer back to our vehicles parked in Marina, so we don’t have to call people to pick us up,” she pointed out.

The race did not see any serious injuries among the participants. Paramedics present at the event said they only dealt with one case of fainting and one minor foot injury.

Several ambulance vehicles and police patrols were present during the walkathon some were parked along the track, while others were present at the finish point.

LOCAL

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

Syrian rival groups fight in Jlaiah: 25 in cusody Two dead in Jahra crash KUWAIT: Police arrested 25 people on Friday in Jlaiah where supporters of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad scuffled with the opponents of the Syrian regime in a massive fight.

Hundreds of people, mostly believed to be Syrian nationals, were involved in the fighting in which sharp edged weapons were used, according to eyewitness accounts. Several people were injured during the melee but by the time police arrived, most of them had left the scene.

Investigations were on to identify and arrest the suspects. Security sources insisted that all steps will be taken to maintain national security.

“Kuwait’s security is a red line, and we will not allow anyone to bring their struggles into Kuwait,” the sources further commented.

Road accident Two teenagers were killed in Al-

Jahra along a street between AlOyoun and Al-Doha on Friday when their vehicle crashed into a light post and broke into half as a result of the impact. The deceased were identified as stateless residents aged 16 and 14. They were pronounced dead on the spot by paramedics. Later, criminal investigators were called to the scene. A case was filed for investigations to determine the circumstances behind the accident.

Boy hospitalized Search is on for a domestic worker who fled an Abdullah AlMubarak home after physically assaulting her employer’s 12-yearold son. The boy received several stitches on his head at the Farwaniya Hospital where he was rushed by his father. The child said the housemaid hit him with a frying

pan in the kitchen. Police believed that pressure of work made the maid lose temper and hit the boy when he asked her repeatedly for a snack while she was preparing dinner.

The man denied knowing what led to his brother ’s deteriorating health, and explained that he escaped because he feared he would be held legally liable.

Investigations were on. (Anba)

Hospital arrest A man was held for investigations after he first brought his brother in an unconscious state to a hospital and then disappeared but returned to check on him. Medical staff at the Jahra Hospital admitted for treatment a young man in a critical condition, dropped off by someone who wanted the patient to be wheelchaired into the hospital but disappeared later.

The same person returned the same night to check on his brother’s condition, and was escorted to the detective’s office after the wheelchair worker identified him.

Pharmacist charged A pharmacist faces legal action after offending God during an argument with a customer in South Surra on Friday. Local police were approached early morning by a Kuwaiti man who filed a case accusing the pharmacist of verbal assault during an argument over an antibiotic prescription. The Jordanian man was summoned and during investigations, he denied insulting the customer but admitted offending God, an offense punishable by jail in Kuwait’s Penal Code. He was referred to the proper authorities for further action. —Al-Watan

Kuwait calls for Arab consensus on IPU emergency draft item QUITO: Kuwait’s parliamentary caucus chief Ali Al-Rashed called on Arab delegations attending Inter-Parliamentary Union talks here yesterday to reach consensus on a draft emergency item, for it to be later voted upon for inclusion on the agenda.

After having headed separate consultative meetings of Gulf Cooperation Council and Arab delegations, he said in a statement that the two meetings focused on the need to reach common ground over individual proposals from Morocco, Jordan, Syria and Iraq.

Morocco’s proposal focuses on the protection of international cultural heritage sites, while Jordan plans to tackle the situation of displaced Syrians in countries neighbouring their own, Iraq, peaceful support for democratic changes in nations, finding solutions to political quarrels through dialogue and tackling fundamental and terrorist groups.

Syria, meanwhile, plans to address the role of parliaments in assuring international security and stability through a peaceful settlement of its current political crisis.

The two meetings also discussed the vacant positions in a number of the IPUs committees, with “consensus reached that Kuwait will be

applying for candidacy of a senior position in the economic committee (the first permanent committee on sustainable development - financing and commerce) - through (Kuwait) MP Mubarak Al-Nejada.”

Members from Bahrain and Sudan will also apply for candidacy of the women’s committee and the international law committee respectively and Egypt, for sub-membership of the international law committee.

Meanwhile, Arab parliamentarians announced their backing of the United Arab Emirates’ proposal, presented to the first permanent committee tasked with international peace and stability on the role of lawmakers in reaching an international agreement that incriminates undermining religious sites and figures and on the need for mutual respect between religions and global cultures as a fundamental factor for international peace, added Al-Rashed.

Separately, Al-Rashed invited the lawmakers to attend the Arab Inter-Parliamentary conference due to be hosted by Kuwait on April 9 and 10. For his part, MP Mubarak Al-Nejada expressed gratitude for the Gulf and Arab delegations support to his nomination for the mem-

bership and a leading post at the first permanent IPU’s committee on sustainable development financing and commerce.

In press statements, Al-Nejada noted that the Arab consensus on his candidacy shows the special relations linking Kuwait to all Arab nations as well as the Arab countries’ confidence in the Kuwait Parliamentary experience.

“Kuwaiti, Gulf and Arab parliamentarians are participating with the international community in the development of the human march. We are keen on having considerable share in the human civilization,” the Kuwaiti MP said.

After participating in the female MPs meeting here, the Kuwaiti MP Safaa Al-Hashim underlined the importance of the female MPs role in highlighting the problems and challenges facing women in the Arab World.

She pointed out that the meeting has discussed a wide array of issues such as the enhancement of women’s role in parliaments, economy, trade and development. In this regard, Al-Hashim hailed Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz’s recent decision to appoint 30 female members in the previously all-male dominated Shura Council, a move which was warmly welcomed at the IPU. — KUNA

KUWAIT: The Kuwait Municipality began its surprise inspection campaign targeting restaurants and central markets located inside the perimeter of hospitals in capital governorate to ensure adherence to health norms and regulations. The drive was meant to check any violations that might affect the safety and health of the consumers. The campaign resulted in 15 citations being handed out and inspectors destroying 20 kg of sweets, pastries and chickpeas since these products were found past their expiry date. Some of the items failed to meet specified standards. — By Hanan Al-Saadoun

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

Taleban threatens to assassinate Musharraf

Fearing stark future, Syrian Alawites meet in Cairo Page 8

Page 11

ALEPPO: Rebels clash with Syrian government forces at Saif Al-Dawla district in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo yesterday. — AFP

Syrian rebels seize base in embattled south Bloody battle near Israel-Syria border BEIRUT: Rebels seized an air defense base near Syria’s strategic southern international highway yesterday, activists said, a gain that could bolster opposition fighters trying to secure supply routes to the capital Damascus. Syria’s southern provinces bordering Jordan and Israel have become an increasingly significant battleground as the embattled capital comes into play, with President Bashar Al-Assad’s forces and his loyalist militias hitting back hard to prevent rebel advances.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has a network of sources among activists across Syria, said among those killed was the base commander after a twoweek battle for the site in Deraa, a province bordering Jordan where initially peaceful protests against Assad set off Syria’s two-year uprising.

“Fighters from the Nusra Front, Yarmouk Martyrs Brigade, and other battalions seized control of the 38th division air defense base, near the town of Saida on the Damascus-Amman highway, after 16 days of fierce clashes,” the Observatory said.

The Nusra Front is an Islamist militant group suspected of links to al Qaeda and blacklisted by the United States as a “terrorist group”. Its forces, which include foreign fighters, have come to increasing prominence in the revolt. A video uploaded by the Observatory, showed what it said was the body of General Mahmoud Darwish, commander at the base, lying in a pool of blood in a bathroom. It was not immediately possible to verify the pictures or activist report.

The Syrian government has severely restricted access to Syria for foreign journalists and international aid groups.

Clashes have also raged near the border with Israel, which is growing concerned that Islamist rebels may be emboldened to end the quiet on the Golan front maintained by Assad and his father before him during their four decade rule

Syrian rebels to address Arab summit, await seat

DAMASCUS: The coffin of Sunni Muslim cleric Mohamed Saeed Al-Bouti, who died in a suicide bomb attack, is carried during his funeral ceremony yesterday at the Omayyad mosque in Damascus.— AFP of Syria. Israel captured the Golan plateau from conflict but now increasingly appears to be Syria in the 1967 Middle East war. Rebels last swinging its weight behind Assad.

Wednesday overran at least three towns near Their involvement could increase sectarian the Israeli-Syrian disengagement line but bloodshed in Syria, already wracked by tensions appeared to lose ground after militias loyal to between the Sunni Muslim majority that has led Assad pushed them back in a fierce battle. the uprising and the Alawite minority to which Rami Abdelrahman, head of the Observatory, Assad belongs. Tit-for-tat kidnappings and said he recorded one of the heaviest single killings between the sects have become comdeath tolls for rebels in the fighting near the mon as the uprising spiraled into a bloody civil Israeli border. “We have 35 fighters recorded by war that has killed more than 70,000 people. name and at least 20 more missing, this is a huge Alawite opposition campaigners, increasingly number to be lost in a single battle and shows concerned for the fate of their community as the how hard they (Assad’s forces) are fighting for fighting continues, will meet this weekend to these areas,” Abdelrahman said. He said the pro- discuss options for supporting a democratic government militias involved were made up of alternative to Assad’s rule and try to distance fighters from Syria’s Druze minority, a sect which themselves from security forces attempts to for some time had stayed on the sidelines of the crush the revolt. — Reuters

Kerry calls on Iran to free US pastor WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State John Kerry urged Iran on Friday to immediately free an Iranian-American Christian pastor who was sentenced to eight years in jail in January.

Kerry said he was “deeply concerned” about the fate of Saeed Abedini, who has already been held for six months in Iran in the notorious Evin prison. The top US diplomat said in a statement that he was also “disturbed by reports that Abedini has suffered physical and psychological abuse in prison, and that his condition has become increasingly dire.

“Such mistreatment violates international norms as well as Iran’s own laws,” Kerry added, saying he was troubled by the lack of due process in the trial, and Iran’s refusal to allow Abedini consular access by Swiss authorities. Abedini, a naturalized US citizen who converted to Christianity, was handed the jail sentence in late January, despite denying “charges of establishing churches to disrupt national security” in Iran and colluding to carry out crimes. His supporters say he led underground churches in the early 2000s when such activity was largely tolerated during the pro-reform presidency of Mohammad Khatami.

Having resettled in the United States, Abedini was detained on a return trip to Iran in 2009 and was then let go following an agreement not to engage in underground religious activities, according to his family. — AFP

DUBAI: Syrian opposition leaders are to address an annual summit of the Arab League for the first time in Qatar on Tuesday, but the bloc’s members remain divided over whether to give them Damascus’s vacant seat. The Qatari hosts are vocal champions of the rebels fighting President Bashar Al-Assad’s regime and said leaders of the armed opposition would definitely be joining Arab heads of state in Doha. But they did not specify whether the Syrian National Coalition would be given Syria’s seat which has been vacant since its suspension from the 22-member bloc in November 2011.

“Arab foreign ministers will decide on the issue of the seat” during a preparatory meeting in Doha on Sunday, an Arab League official said.

The Arab League called on the National Coalition on March 6 to form an executive body to take up Syria’s seat and take part in the summit. But Lebanon distanced itself from the decision, while Algeria and Iraq expressed reservations.

In all, nine of the bloc’s other 21 members retain diplomatic missions in Damascus-Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, Sudan and Yemen-despite its decision last November to recognize the National Coalition as the legitimate representative

of the Syrian people.

The opposition alliance has begun steps to form an executive body to administer rebel-held territory inside Syria, electing Ghassan Hitto as interim premier at a meeting in Turkey on Tuesday. But a League official said the National Coalition needed to go further.

Hitto’s election “is important but is not enough,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “We are still waiting for the formation of the interim government.”

Hitto will be among the opposition delegates addressing the Doha summit, National Coalition member Ahmed Ramadan said.

“We will be represented by interim Prime Minister Ghassan Hitto, National Coalition head Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib, and the chief of staff of the (rebel) Syrian Free Army, General Selim Idriss,” Ramadan said. “For the first time ever, the delegation should be addressing the Arab summit.” Hitto is charged with forming a government of technocrats to establish the rule of law and basic services in rebel-held areas. But his election highlighted deep divisions within the opposition bloc, with at least 12 of its 49 members announcing the following day that they were suspending their membership in protest.—AFP

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

I N T E R N AT I O N A L

Fearing stark future, Syrian Alawites meet in Cairo AMMAN: Opposition campaigners from Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s Alawite sect met this weekend to support a democratic alternative to his rule and try to distance the community from wholesale association with the government’s attempts to crush a two-year uprising. The two-day meeting in Cairo, the first by Alawites supportive of the revolt, will draft a declaration committing to a united Syria and inviting the mainstream opposition to cooperate on preventing sectarian bloodletting if Assad falls and agree on a transitional justice framework, organizers said.

As the war takes on an increasingly sectarian bent, severing the Alawite fate from that of Assad could be crucial for the survival of the community, an offshoot of Shiite Islam that comprises about 10 percent of Syria’s population.

“The meeting is happening almost two years late, but it will help disassociate the sect from Assad. Every effort is needed now to prevent a wide-scale sectarian bloodbath when Assad eventually goes, in which the Alawites would be the main losers,” a Western diplomat said.

At least 70,000 people have been killed since a peaceful protest movement led by Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority broke out against four decades of family rule by Assad and his father, members of the Alawite sect. The

demonstrations were met by bullets, eventually sparking a Sunni backlash and a mostly Islamist armed insurgency that is leading some Alawites to fear they have no future without Assad.

Assad has said he is fighting a foreignbacked conspiracy to divide Syria and that the rebel forces are Islamist “terrorists.”

A statement by the organizing committee of the Alawite conference said: “The regime, which is becoming more isolated and weak, is working on turning sectarian zealotry into bloodshed. There are anti-regime forces also pushing toward sectarian warfare.” “Depriving the regime of the sectarian card is crucial for its ouster and for negotiating a Syrian national covenant on the basis of a modern statehood and equal citizenship and justice,” the statement said.

About 150 Alawite figures, including activists and religious leaders, who were mostly forced to flee Syria for supporting the revolt, will attend the conference in Cairo, which started yesterday. Alawites were prominent in a leftist Syrian political movement that was crushed by Assad’s father, Hafez Al-Assad, in the 1970s and 1980s, along with Islamist opposition.

DEMOCRATIC ASPIRATIONS Among prominent Alawites currently

in jail is free-speech advocate Mazen Darwish, who worked on documenting the victims of the crackdown against the revolt, and Abdelaziz Al-Khayyer, a centrist politician who advocated peaceful transition to democratic rule. Issam AlYoussef, an activist who is helping organize the conference, said the uprising had given the Alawites a chance to show the sect was not monolithic, and that it aspired like the rest of the population to live under a multi-party democracy, while fearing the rise of Islamist extremism.

Ibrahim recalled taking part in a prodemocracy demonstration at the beginning of the uprising in the Sunni district of Al-Khalidiya in the central city of Homs when the protesters came under attack by a pro-Assad militia. “A group of us took refuge in a house, and the house owner, who did not know I was Alawite, began cursing Alawites. When my comrades told him I was one, he came to me and gave me the keys to his house.” “We are in a sectarian crisis and the political forces of the opposition are falling into a serious error by not discussing it,” Ibrahim, whose father was jailed for years under the rule of the elder Assad, told Reuters.

He said the document that would emerge from the conference “will affirm Alawite commitment to national unity

TRIPOLI: Lebanese Sunni gunmen opposed to the regime of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad head to join their comrades in Bab El-Tebbaneh neighborhood during clashes with Alawite supporters of Assad in the northern city of Tripoli. Tripoli has been rocked by deadly clashes between supporters and opponents of the Damascus regime, where a two-year conflict has killed at least 70,000 people. — AFP and inter-communal existence and civic peace,” mirroring a stance the sect’s leaders took during French colonial rule in the 1920s in opposition to proposals for partition of the country. “There is an

Lebanese PM quits Resignation follows standoff with Hezbollah BEIRUT: Lebanon’s president accepted the resignation of Prime Minister Najib Mikati yesterday, Mikati said, calling for a “salvation” caretaker government to take over after a political standoff with the Hezbollah movement. His departure could plunge Lebanon, already struggling to cope with a spillover of violence and refugees from Syria’s two-year-old civil war, into further turmoil and uncertainty three months before a planned parliamentary election.

The resignation on Friday came after a twoday ministerial meeting remained deadlocked by a dispute with Shiite group Hezbollah, a militant and political movement that has dominated Lebanese politics in recent years and helped put Mikati into office after toppling the previous government. Mikati said he had handed in his resignation to President Michel Suleiman. “Now it is important for dialogue to begin and for a salvation government to be established during this difficult period,” Mikati wrote on his official Twitter page. “I thank God that I left office the same way I came in, with integrity.”

Hezbollah opposed extending the term of a senior security official, Major General Ashraf Rifi, and the creation of an oversight body for the planned June election, which may now be delayed after the collapse of Mikati’s government. Rifi, head of Lebanon’s internal security forces, is due to retire early next month. He, like Mikati, is a Sunni Muslim from Tripoli, and is distrusted by Hezbollah. Putting together a caretaker government could take months. It took Mikati five months to put together his government after he became prime minister in 2011 when Hezbollah and its partners brought down the unity government of Saad Al-Hariri.

But tensions over Syria have put him at odds with the group that brought him to power and which strongly backs President Bashar Al-Assad

in the Syrian civil war. Under Lebanon’s division of power, the prime minister must be a Sunni Muslim, the president a Maronite Christian and the speaker of parliament a Shiite Muslim.

Former Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, a close political ally of Hariri who had frequently called for Mikati to step down, said the resignation “opens the possibility of fresh dialogue” between Lebanon’s political camps.

Mikati had sought to distance his country which fought its own 15-year civil war - from

Syria’s strife. But in the ex-prime minister’s home city of Tripoli, two people died in clashes on Friday between militants supporting opposing sides of the Syria conflict.

Sporadic clashes erupted again in Tripoli yesterday, residents said, with at least two people wounded by sniper fire. The influx of Syrian refugees, as well as Lebanon’s own political turmoil, have caused a sharp slowdown in Lebanon’s economy and a 67 percent surge in its budget deficit last year. — Reuters

BEIRUT: Lebanese President Michel Suleiman (left) meets Prime Minister Najib Mikati in Beirut yesterday. Mikati announced the resignation of his government on March 22, citing divisions on several domestic issues, and called for the formation of a national unity government. — AFP

It’s ‘too soon to return’ for Malians who fled Islamists SEVARE: Under the blazing African sun in a makeshift tent city in the Inner Niger Delta, 600 Malians live side-by-side, waiting for the day they feel safe enough to return to their homes. They are among thousands of “internally displaced people” (IDPs) who fled when Islamist fighters cut a swathe through the north of their country a year ago, occupying towns and cities and imposing a brutal version of Islamic sharia law.

For months they have been housed in dozens of tents in a camp run by local authorities with the help of the UN and humanitarian organizations in the town of Sevare, 600 kilometers northeast of the Malian capital, Bamako. Life in the camp is a daily struggle against hardship and boredom, but they receive food rations, medical attention and, most importantly, sanctuary from the conflict still raging in the north of the west African nation. “I don’t want to go home yet. The war isn’t over, and I have nothing to eat in my village,” one young woman said, echoing the sentiments of many in the camp.

Gao and the other main cities of Mali’s vast northern desert, comprising about 60 percent of the country’s surface area, fell to ethnic Tuareg rebels in the vacuum left by a military coup a year ago. They lost control to Al-Qaeda-linked radicals who destroyed Muslim shrines, carrying out amputations, executions and beatings, before Mali’s former colonial ruler France sent in troops and took back the cities of the north in January. With French and African soldiers in a battle to flush out armed Islamists entrenched in the northeastern Infoghas mountains, thousands of those displaced by the fighting are still waiting to go home. “I do not want to return immediately to my village, which is

not far from Gao. It seems that the Islamists are still in my village. And how am I going to eat?” said Marietou, a mother in her 50s, surrounded by five of her children.

And so she and her fellow IDPs stay, the children passing the time by kicking around a football while others play around taps which spit out drinking water. At the entrance of the camp, many women sit on mats and watch television. “Some who were here went home, but many others do not want to return,” said Aisha Dembele, the camp coordinator. Some 170,000 Malians left northern Mali for neighboring countries and 260,000 have fled their homes to seek refuge elsewhere within Mali since early 2012, according to the UN. People staying in the camp are entitled to medicine and food rations donated through the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) and charities. “We cannot get all that in any of the three northern regions if we go there,” said Boubel, a young farmer who lost his livestock due to the crisis in the country.

‘THE CRISIS IS NOT OVER’ Camp doctor Souleymane Sanogo says the patients he sees in his clinic often suffer from ulcers due to stress. “In talking with them, we realize that the stress can be explained by the fact that they are afraid to go home,” he says. He points to a patient sitting on a bench who refuses to return to her village in the region around the fabled northwestern desert city of Timbuktu, even though her husband and three of her six children have already begun the journey back. In Sevare, the regional capital Mopti and the area around both towns, there are some 40,000 IDPs living in camps or with host families, according to Ibrahima Hama

Traore, the governor of the Mopti region. “Life is returning to normal in the region since the intervention of French-African troops but the situation of IDPs remains a concern,” he said.

After a visit to the Sevare camp on Sunday, WFP executive director Ertharin Cousin cautioned that “the crisis is not over in Mali”, even if the fighting is now concentrated in the extreme north-east.

The WFP plans to provide food assistance to more than one million people this year in Mali, a country hit hard last year-especially in the north-by severe drought along with its neighbors in the Sahel region.

The presence of IDPs in towns in the Inner Niger Delta is starting to present other less obvious but equally pressing problems, say locals. — AFP

Arab League factfile DOHA: The Arab League, whose annual summit opens in Qatar on Tuesday, represents some 367 million people in 22 countries, but Syria’s membership was suspended in 2011 over its brutal response to protests. The pan-Arab bloc was created in Cairo on March 22, 1945. It comprises Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen and Palestine, currently represented by the Palestinian Authority. The Arab League has had its headquarters in Cairo, with the exception of an 11-year gap when member states decided to move it to Tunis to punish Egypt for having signed a separate peace treaty with Israel in 1979.

The League is governed by a charter signed in 1945 and a joint defense and economic cooperation treaty signed in 1950. Its main objective is to “consolidate links between its member states and to coordinate their policies with a view to ensuring cooperation between them and preserve their independence and their sovereignty”. It is supposed to achieve “cooperation between the member countries in the economic, financial, cultural and social domains”.

In January, Arab leaders meeting in Riyadh pledged to remove obstacles to finalizing a free trade zone this year and agreed to facilitate capital flows. The League’s decision-making body is its Council, which is made up of representatives of the member states, whether heads of state or government, or ministers. The supreme body is the Arab summit, which takes decisions by unanimity and meets once a year. The first Arab summit was held in January 1964, and recognized the necessity of the creation of a Palestinian entity.

The League’s secretary generals are traditionally drawn from the country that hosts its headquarters. Egypt’s Nabil Al-Arabi succeeded his compatriot Amr Mussa in May 2011, for a five-year term. The League voted at an extraordinary meeting in November 2011 to suspend Syria until President Bashar al-Assad implements an Arab peace plan that requires him to step down. — AFP

Islamist current that is expanding at the expense of the democratic civic current, which needs to unite,” Ibrahim said. “We as Alawites are Syrians first. We are trying to be part of a real change.” — Reuters

Egypt police guard Brotherhood’s HQ CAIRO: Police were out in force yesterday outside the headquarters of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood a day after more than 160 people were hurt in running street battles between Islamists and opposition protesters. An AFP journalist reported a heavy police presence at the building in the Mokattam neighborhood, and the official MENA news agency cited a health ministry spokesman as saying more than 160 people were injured the night before. Businesses in the area remained closed, and debris from the violence was visible everywhere.

Thousands of Egyptian protesters clashed with riot police and backers of the president’s Muslim Brotherhood on Friday, ransacking several offices nationwide as anger over allegations of beatings and power-grabbing boiled over into the largest and most violent demonstrations yet on the doorstep of the powerful group. As night fell, streets surrounding the Brotherhood headquarters were littered with shattered glass, charred vehicles, stones and gloves stained with blood. The number of injured reached nearly 100 from the two sides.

“We came to the stronghold of the Brotherhood. No more protests in front of the presidential palace because those ruling Egypt are here,” said 50-year-old Hamat Awat, a female protester while running away from volleys of tear gas fired by blackclad riot police guarding the headquarters.

Anger erupted a week ago when Brotherhood members beat journalists and liberal and secular activists during a protest outside the group’s Cairo headquarters.

Journalists were there to cover a meeting. Protesters demand an apology, but the fundamentalist movement said its guards were provoked and acted in self-defense.

After smaller demonstrations since last weekend outside the headquarters, thousands of activists thronged to the building and battled Brotherhood supporters with birdshot, rocks, knives, sticks and their fists Friday. Gunshots were heard ringing in the neighborhood.

Three Brotherhood offices were ransacked by mobs in another Cairo neighborhood, in the second-largest city of Alexandria and in the Nile Delta city of Mahalla. Egypt has faced near-constant turmoil in the more than two years since longtime, authoritarian leader Hosni Mubarak was overthrown in a revolt. His successor Mohammed Morsi, the country’s first democratically elected leader, has faced increasing frustration over what many see as attempts by his group to monopolize power and the slow pace of his efforts to reform the state and fulfill the revolution’s promises of better living standards and justice.

Thousands of policemen, meanwhile, have gone on strike, refusing to confront protesters, and in some provinces, Egyptians have taken to vigilante violence and killings to fight crime. The unrest has badly hurt the economy, with foreign investors and tourists largely staying away, and a diesel crisis that has crippled life for millions. Morsi’s opponents - led by many of

the activists who were at the forefront of the mass protests leading to Mubarak’s ouster - charge that he has done little to improve the country in the nine months since he took office. They accuse the Brotherhood, which rose in power after years of repression under the former secular regime, of seeking to monopolize power, a charge the group denies.

The anti-Brotherhood protesters demanding the resignation of the attorney general and the interior minister, both presidential appointees. They also accuse the interior minister of authorizing security forces to use excessive force against protesters. More than 70 people have been killed in protests with police since Mohammed Ibrahim was appointed in January.

Muslim Brotherhood spokesman Yasser Mehres blamed opposition parties for calling Friday’s protest outside the group’s headquarters. He said it gave way for “thugs” to infiltrate and attack Brotherhood offices. “Right now, Brotherhood buses are being burnt and there are serious injuries with people in critical condition,” he said. “It is not acceptable that Egyptians watch TV and see this farce taking place as Egyptians fight one another.”

Young men threw stones and wielded tree branches and broken bottles as they chanted against Morsi near the Brotherhood’s headquarters in Cairo. One sign held aloft by a protester outside the headquarters read: “Who is ruling Egypt?”

Riot police stood guard around the building but initially didn’t interfere to break up the two sides fighting a few blocks away. Later in the evening, the police fired volleys of tear gas at protesters who tried to approach the headquarters.

Black plumes of smoke billowed after protesters torched buses that had ferried Brotherhood members to the site, and security officials said at least 100 people were injured. Fatima Khalifa, 30, said she was demonstrating to send a message to the Brotherhood that they are the aggressors.

“Morsi must be tried for killings of protesters just like Mubarak,” she said. The Brotherhood spokesman said the group’s headquarters was the wrong place to demand change. “The protesters’ demands should be delivered to the government and president, not the Brotherhood office because even though the president came from the group, he makes decisions that are separate from the group,” Mehres said. In another Cairo neighborhood, young protesters broke into the Brotherhood party’s office in Manial and stole some items, according to security officials. In Alexandria, an AP cameraman saw protesters attack the Brotherhood party’s office, leaving with computers, files and other objects. The attack took place near the site where unknown assailants fought protesters demanding the resignation of Morsi, who is a member of the party. They also torched a Brotherhood office in the Nile Delta city of Mahalla, a security official said. —Agencies

CAIRO: Egyptian members of the Muslim brotherhoods group try to extinguish fire on one of their comrades who he was hit by a molotov cocktail thrown by protesters during clashes in the street that leads to the headquarters of the organization in Cairo. — AFP

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

I N T E R N AT I O N A L

Horse shooting highlights slaughter debate ALBUQUERQUE: An Internet video that shows a meat company employee swearing at animal activists before shooting a horse in the head highlights the increasing emotional intensity of the national debate over whether a New Mexico plant should be allowed to resume domestic horse slaughter. Animal rights groups this week uncovered a video posted by a former employee of Valley Meat Co, which has been fighting the United States Department of Agriculture for more than a year for approval to convert its former cattle slaughter operation into a horse slaughterhouse.

Valley Meat Co owner Rick De Los Santos said the employee, who was let go this week, was reacting to harassment by animal rights activists who have targeted the plant since its plans were made public about a year ago. The harassment has worsened since the video, made a year ago, was uncovered this week, he said. “We are get-

ting lots of threats: that we better watch our back, watch who is around us, that they hope our kids and families get killed, ugly stuff,” De Los Santos said Friday.

The video shows Tim Sappington of Dexter leading a seemingly healthy horse by a rope to a spot in a dirt road. He strokes his nose and neck, says, “All you animal activists, (expletive) you,” then shoots it in the head. Chaves County Sheriff Rob Coon said the department is bracing for things to get worse as the company nears a final inspection by federal regulators with the hope of opening horse slaughter operations next month. The video, he said, “didn’t help anything,” noting the issue is “very emotional.” De Los Santos said he has hired a security firm to guard his company and its workers.

The New Mexico Livestock Board has launched an inquiry into the shooting as a possible case of animal abuse. But the sher-

iff noted that it’s not illegal for a horse owner to kill the animal and eat it, saying it’s no different than a farmer who slaughters his pig and consumes the meat. That’s because horses are considered livestock and no different under the law than cattle or pigs.

“Everybody is up in arms,” Coon said. “The sad part is - or maybe it’s good for himthere is not a law that says you can’t slaughter your livestock for consumption. And he is a horse eater.”

No one answered a telephone listing for Sappington in Dexter on Friday. De Los Santos said Sappington actually filmed the entire process for preparing the horse for consumption. But he only posted part of the video. Carolyn Schnurr, federal legislative manager of government relations for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, called the video “emotionally disturbing.” But she said the group does not condone violence, and reminded

Immigration reform talks stalled by wage disputes AFL-CIO, Chamber of Commerce trade accusations WASHINGTON: Senate negotiations on revamping the US immigration system are stalled over wages for future lowskilled foreign workers such as construction laborers, cooks, janitors and hotel maids, sources familiar with the talks said on Friday. Bipartisan talks aimed at producing a comprehensive immigration law - including a path to citizenship for undocumented immi-

porarily. The source said Democrats presented a plan and Republicans accepted it, but when senators showed it to the AFL-CIO, the labor union federation said no. But, according to the AFLCIO, Democrats presented Republicans with a plan and the Republicans rejected it.

The proposal would have borrowed language on wages for temporary

NEW YORK: Immigrants from Colombia and Ecuador hold a candlelight vigil for immigration reform in New York City. —AFP grants and a new process for controlling the flow of temporary workers have been underway for months and were close to producing a bill.

There were conflicting versions of the disagreement. According to one source who asked not to be identified, the eight senators involved in the discussions had tentatively agreed on a plan to govern wage levels for lowskilled foreigners who would be given visas to work in the United States tem-

workers from the “H2B” visa program for temporary, seasonal workers. That specifies that the visas will only be issued if they do not drive down the wages of those doing the same job in the United States. Also in dispute was the inclusion of construction workers in the plan, which business wants and labor does not. As senators tried to wrap up the complex negotiations and then leave Washington for a two-week recess, business and labor groups trad-

ed accusations. Randel Johnson, a senior vice president of the US Chamber of Commerce, Washington’s largest business lobby, said “unions have jeopardized the entire immigration reform effort...because of their refusal to take a responsible stance on a small temporary worker program.” Organized labor had a similarly angry characterization of the status of talks. “ There is an uncomprehending level of anger. We have conceded on so many different grounds. They (Republicans) want to pave the path to citizenship with poverty,” said Jeff Hauser, a spokesman with the AFL-CIO. In the midst of the labor-business dispute, senators were still voicing optimism for getting a deal. Support from organized labor and the chamber is considered crucial to getting any immigration law through the Congress. Finding a solution acceptable to both has always been considered the most difficult challenge by the group of four Republicans and four Democrats involved in the negotiations. On Friday, Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, one of the eight, said that while he was “guardedly optimistic” about the negotiations, “we hit bumps every five minutes.”

On Thursday, another member of the group, Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York, told reporters the bipartisan group would meet its end-ofmonth timetable for a deal. Schumer said it would be “an agreement with a darn good chance of becoming law.”

While that was before negotiations between the Chamber and AFL-CIO spiraled into open warfare, a spokesman for Schumer late Friday said the senator stands by his statement. The eight senators will continue talking during the congressional recess, according to aides. —Reuters

Trouble on US farms: Crops rot as growers seek workers OXNARD: Here’s a mess with no easy fix: American crops going unpicked-it’s backbreaking work Americans won’t touch and poor migrants in need of work shying from it for fear of being abused. Creating a program for temporary farm workers from Mexico and other countries to work the land, sow seeds or reap harvests is one of the touchiest aspects of the immigration reform that Congress is working on.

Some 61 percent of growers in California report shortages of laborers, especially in

added: “Our concern is, what will happen over the long term if we continue to see this labor supply shortage and there’s nothing done on immigration reform. Where will our labor supply come from?” Wendy Moore, who grows wine grapes in Lodi, northeast of San Francisco, said a shortage of workers meant a delayed harvest and thus grapes with a higher sugar content, which is not good for wineries.

So what’s the problem? Workers are scarce because deportations are on the rise

CALIFORNIA: Migrant workers harvest strawberries at a farm near Oxnard, California. —AFP labor intensive crops like grapes and vegetables, said Rayne Pegg of the California Farm Bureau Federation. So some crops are left to rot. In the peak of the harvest season, California needs some 400,000 farmhands, and usually 70 percent of them are undocumented immigrants, Pegg said. At the national level, half of the million workers that put fruit and vegetables on the tables of American families lack work papers, says FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

“We do rely on a foreign workforce. We really have an issue in terms of attracting domestic workers. They typically don’t want to work in agriculture. It’s out in the elements, it can be a hard job,” said Pegg. She

and laws in some states are tough on undocumented foreigners. Thus, immigrants are wary of moving around like they used to, in search of seasonal farm work. Secondly, fewer Mexicans are coming across because of tighter security at the border, said Pegg.

What is more, as the estimated 11 million immigrants living illegally in the United States improve their standard of living, crouching down for hours on end to pick lettuce or strawberries under a punishing sun is no longer a must for them in order to get by.

For all these reasons, American growers want a visa program that will allow foreigners to come in and work the land, then go back home, Pegg said.

A similar plan does exist. But it is so

expensive and so thick with red tape that growers prefer to cut corners and opt to contract undocumented workers. Transferring this visa into an efficient program seems to be the ideal solution for growers and for ensuring food supplies in the US. But the devil is in the details. Mexican laborers at the California Mushroom Farm, for instance, fear that with a plan like that, new arrivals will cause them to lose benefits they have earned over the years, such as health insurance and paid vacations.

In Oxnard, 100 kilometers northwest of Los Angeles, Mexican worker Reinaldo Arevalo, 61 and with bushy mustache, said a program for temporary workers would not help people like him at all. Arevalo and fellow Mexican co-worker Alfredo Zamora had just arrived at the offices of the United Farm Workers union, where they are members, from the mushroom farm. Along the highway are vast fields of strawberries and raspberries. All one can see of the pickers are their bent-over backs.

“The people who are here do not demand things, because they want to work,” Arevalo said, referring to undocumented immigrants. “And the people that come from outside in the future are not going to demand things either, because they want to work. So who is going to suffer? We are, the stable workers.” “The one coming in is not going to fight for what we have,” added Zamora, who is 53. They say the solution is to legalize the undocumented workers who are already in the country working, often earning less than the minimum wage of eight dollars an hour and exposed to abuse and sexual harassment because of their legal status.

In 1942 the federal government implemented a program that until 1964 filled American farm fields with tens of thousands of Mexicans, who were totally at the mercy of foremen. “With growers in charge, guestworkers’ model contracts often proved meaningless because employers had the power to repatriate workers who tried to enforce them. Workers who complained, went on strike, or sought a lawyer could be deported and replaced,” wrote Cindy Hahamovitch, author of a book entitled “No Man’s Land”, in a piece in the Miami Herald. —AFP

others opposed to horse slaughter to “stay focused on what needs to be done to help American horses ... to end the slaughter of American horses.” Horse slaughter opponents are pushing legislation in Congress to ban domestic slaughter, as well as the export of horses to other countries for slaughter. The debate is raging amid a recent uproar in Europe over horse meat being found in products labeled as beef. De Los Santos has said the meat from his plant would be processed for human consumption in Russia, eastern Europe and Asia. It will also be used for pet foods. Last year, De Los Santos sued the USDA to resume the inspections necessary to open what would be the nation’s first horse slaughterhouse in more than five years.

The USDA earlier this month said it has no choice legally but to move forward with the application of Valley Meat and several other companies since Congress lifted a ban

on the practice. The company’s attorney, A Blair Dunn, said earlier this week that a final inspection of the plant by USDA officials is expected in early April. Many animal humane groups and public officials are outraged at the idea of resuming domestic slaughter, including New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, who points to the iconic animal’s role as a loyal companion in the West. But others - including some horse rescuers, livestock associations and the American Quarter Horse Association - support the plans. They point to a 2011 report from the federal Government Accountability Office that shows horse abuse and abandonment have been increasing since Congress effectively banned horse slaughter by cutting funding for federal inspection programs in 2006. They say the ban on domestic slaughter has led to tens of thousands of horses being shipped to inhumane slaughterhouses in Mexico. — AP

Judge hears suit on Arizona ban on immigrant driver’s licenses PHOENIX: Lawyers have asked a federal judge to prevent Arizona from denying driver’s licenses to young illegal immigrants granted temporary legal status by the US government in the Southwestern state’s latest court clash over the Obama administration’s immigration policies. Civil rights groups filed a lawsuit in US District Court in Phoenix in November against Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and two state transport department officials on behalf of five immigrants from Mexico who qualify for deferred deportation status under President Barack Obama’s program.

The suit challenges the legality of an executive order issued by Brewer in August that denied the young migrants licenses, arguing that the US government’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program did not give them lawful status or entitle them to public benefits. On Friday, Judge David Campbell heard brief arguments in which the plaintiffs sought an injunction ordering Arizona to issue the licenses pending the court’s ruling. The state asked for the case to be dismissed.

At issue is whether the plaintiffs’ deferred deportation status constitutes federal “authorization” to be in the United States, a requirement under Arizona law for immigrants to obtain drivers licenses.

“Every non-citizen with a work permit is considered to be authorized, with one exception - everyone but DACA,” Jennifer

Chang Newell, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney representing the plaintiffs, told the court. Newell argued that Brewer’s policy amounts to an attempt by the state of Arizona to determine immigration status, a power reserved only for the federal government.

The court battle is the latest for Brewer, a Republican who has become a major antagonist of Obama’s Democratic administration and its immigration policies. About 40 states and the District of Columbia have confirmed they are granting driver’s licenses or plan to do so for undocumented youths who received a short-term reprieve from Obama under the program in June. While Republicans in some US states have opposed drivers licenses for illegal immigrants, only Arizona and Nebraska have said outright that young immigrants are not eligible.

‘NO LAWFUL OR AUTHORIZED STATUS’ Under Obama’s program, immigrants who came to the United States as children and meet certain other criteria can apply for a work permit for a renewable period of two years. They also can obtain Social Security numbers. An estimated 1.7 million youths are potentially eligible for the program, of whom about 80,000 live in Arizona. As of mid-February, about 200,000 applicants nationwide been granted deferred action, according to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

They are considered to be lawfully pres-

ent in the United States during that period, although they do not have full legal status. Brewer maintains that the president’s policy did not “confer upon them any lawful or authorized status and does not entitle them to any additional public benefits.”

Attorney Doug Northrop, representing the state, told the court there is no federal definition of “authorized” presence, and that the plaintiffs do not have “lawful” status. Arizona, he argued, is not determining migrants’ status, but is simply ruling that they cannot have drivers licenses. The state “didn’t create their own status. They just said (they) don’t meet it,” he told the judge. Campbell said he would rule on the issue in the coming weeks. In 2010, Brewer signed into law a controversial bill cracking down on illegal immigrants and setting up the clash with the Obama administration.

The centerpiece of the Arizona law, which requires police to check the immigration status of every person they stop if they suspect they are in the country illegally, was upheld by the US Supreme Court in June. Obama is pushing Congress to pass a bill overhauling the US immigration system, granting millions of illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, as well as tightening security on the border with Mexico. Democrats and Republicans in both the US Senate and the House of Representatives are close to completing work on a draft bill.—Reuters

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

I N T E R N AT I O N A L

OAS reaffirms autonomy of human rights body WASHINGTON: The Organization of American States reaffirmed the financial autonomy of Latin America’s premier human rights body late Friday, rejecting attempts by Venezuela and its allies to block US-financed programs. But in a resolution adopted by consensus, OAS foreign ministers allowed continued debate on reforming the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

The decision was seen as a bow to the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA), which includes Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and several Caribbean nations.

The final resolution, adopted after a marathon session of the group, allowed outside financial contributions for the

News

in brief

Gunmen kill 4 prisoners JAKARTA: Unidentified gunmen forced their way into an Indonesian jail early yesterday and shot dead four prisoners awaiting trial over the death of a soldier, police said. The prisoners were accused of beating and stabbing to death a soldier from the military’s elite Special Forces Command on Tuesday at a nightclub in Yogyakarta in central Java. Yogyakarta police spokeswoman Anny Pudjiastuti said between 10 and 15 gunmen were involved in the attack on the prisoners at the Cebongan Correctional Centre after midnight Friday. “The four bodies have been taken to hospital for autopsy. Police are at the prison to investigate,” Pudjiastuti said, adding two guards had been wounded and police were studying CCTV footage. Another police source close to the case said the gunmen were armed with AK-47 assault rifles and at least one pistol. The source said they had threatened to knock down the prison door with grenades and forced the guard to show them to the cell holding the four prisoners.

Tornado kills 20 DHAKA: A tornado swept through nearly two dozen villages southeast of the Bangladeshi capital, killing at least 20 people, tearing roofs off houses and uprooting trees and power pylons, officials said. The death toll could rise sharply as more than 300 people were injured when the twister struck Brahmanbaria district, more than 100 km southeast of Dhaka, on Friday evening.

More than 500 dwellings suffered damage. Rescue teams were dispatched to the area, but uprooted trees and wrecked vehicles closed large stretches of highway and rail lines. Among the damaged buildings was Brahmanbaria jail, which partially collapsed, killing a guard. But officials said all inmates remained inside the facility and were safe.

“It destroyed everything I had. Nothing is left,” Mohammad Nizam, a village resident said. “We found ourselves rolling in the mud within minutes.”

Inmates break out of jail ATHENS: Two prison guards were shot and wounded as at least five inmates broke out of a prison in central Greece Friday, police said. They were hit by fire from a Kalashnikov automatic rifle as they tried to tackle the prisoners at the jail in the town of Trikala, the statement added. Five or six prisoners escaped from a prison wing where Albanian nationals are being held in a car that had been waiting for them outside the prison, according to media reports. Police have not immediately confirm the reports. In 2008, guards at Trikala foiled a bid by Panayotis Vlastos, one of the masterminds in the kidnapping of a Greek shipping magnate, to escape from the prison by helicopter.

In that incident the helicopter made an emergency landing in the prison courtyard after it was caught in the fire between the armed men on board and prison guards.

Gunmen free inmates LAGOS: Gunmen attacked a prison in Ganye in Nigeria’s eastern Adamawa state, setting free inmates and also looting a bank, a senior prison official and police said. “I can confirm that there was a jailbreak in Ganye by some gunmen this evening. Explosives were used by the attackers to forcefully gain entrance into the prison,” Andrew Barka, head of the state prison service said. “We still don’t know how many inmates were freed or if there were any casualties,” he said. State police spokesman Mohammed Ibrahim confirmed that gunmen attacked the prison, a nearby police station, a tavern and a bank which he said was set on fire after they looted it. “We have received signals on coordinated attacks by some unknown assailants in Ganye this evening. They launched simultaneous attacks on the prison, the divisional police office, a bank and an open-air tavern,” he said. The gunmen used improvised explosive devices on their targets and fired assault rifles. He said that although details of the attacks were sketchy, troops and policemen have been deployed to the area.

Italy’s Bersani scrambles for parliament support ROME: Italy entered uncharted waters yesterday as centre-left leader Pier Luigi Bersani scrambled to find a parliamentary majority even though his coalition failed to get enough votes in elections that have left the country in deadlock. The leftist was given the go-ahead by President Giorgio Napolitano on Friday to try and win over lawmakers from rival parties after his coalition won a majority in the lower house but not in the upper house in last month’s vote a first in Italy’s post-war history. Bersani began his consultations immediately after getting the nod from Napolitano, who asked him to report back “as quickly as possible” and warned that Italy was in a “social and economic crisis” as it endures its longest recession in two decades. European capitals and financial markets are watching nervously and have pressed for the euro-zone’s third largest economy to move quickly, particularly after a bailout dispute for Cyprus reignited fears over the euro area debt crisis.

IACHR. It also said the “dialogue of the fundamental aspects of the commission’s functioning will continue.” The special OAS meeting was held to finalize a two-year process to reform the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights. “For more than five decades, the commission has served as the hemisphere’s moral conscience,” US Undersecretary of State William Burns said during the special session.

Argentine Foreign Minister Hector Timerman delivered a passionate defense of the body. “The people of the region remember, and those people know that it’s better to have an InterAmerican Commission than not have one, because today we are going

through a period of democracy-but when we need it to fight a dictatorship, if we don’t protect the commission today, it won’t be there to help us,” he said. However, the leftist bloc of Ecuador, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia is wary about ways of financing the IACHR. It presented a surprise draft resolution calling to extend discussions on reforms at least until June.

Those countries see the OAS as a group that favors US interests, and the rights commission as a way for Washington and its supporters to interfere in their internal affairs. Ecuadoran Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said more debate was needed on issues such as moving the commission out of

Washington, defining its authority to demand that governments take “cautionary measures” in human rights cases, and the role of its special investigators.

One demand was for the commission to be banned from accepting donations from outside the region, where a full third of its budget comes from. In particular, the commission’s special rapporteur on freedom of expression depends exclusively on donations, half of them from European countries. This special rapporteur has angered Ecuador and Venezuela by repeatedly accusing their governments of harassing the media.

However IACHR chairman Jose de Jesus Orozco said the funds were necessary for them to do their job properly.

The United States, which along with Mexico and Canada called for an immediate end to discussions, announced a special $1 million contribution to the Commission, whose annual budget is $9.5 million. “A stronger and more capable Commission is in all our interests,” Burns said. Mexico announced $300,000 in aid, while Chile provided unspecified “additional” contributions. Argentina has previously pledged $400,000. Last year, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez announced that his country would withdraw from the IACHR. Caracas has been on the Commission’s black list since 2002, and since that year Venezuela has refused to allow IACHR staff to visit the country.—AFP

France and UK fail to win easing of Syrian arms ban Germany ‘reluctant’ UK worried about chemical weapons DUBLIN: France and Britain failed to persuade the European Union to back their call to lift an arms embargo on Syrian rebels on Friday despite warning that President Bashar Al-Assad could resort to using chemical weapons. Paris and London want to exempt Assad’s opponents from an EU arms embargo, a step they believe would raise pressure on Assad to negotiate after two years of a civil war that has claimed 70,000 lives. But they won little support from other EU member states at a foreign ministers’ meeting in Dublin, diplomats said, despite raising concerns about chemical weapons to bolster their case.

“I insisted that very close attention must be paid to the possible use by Assad of chemical weapons ... There are indications that he might have used them or that he might use them,” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told reporters at the close of Friday’s talks. Assad’s supporters and opponents accused each other of using chemical weapons after 26 people were killed in a rocket attack near the northern city of Aleppo this week. In a letter to EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton setting out their case, Fabius and British Foreign Secretary William Hague said they were “increasingly concerned about the regime’s willingness to use chemical weapons”.

Countries such as Germany and Austria remain opposed to lifting the arms embargo for the rebels. They fear it could lead to weapons falling into the hands of Islamist militants, fuel regional conflict and encourage Assad’s backers, Iran and Russia, to step up arms supplies to him. “We are reluctant about lifting the embargo ... We have to avoid that weapons could come into the

DUBLIN: European Union ministers pose for a family photo after the GYMNICH, an Informal Meeting of European Union Foreign Ministers at Dublin Castle in Dublin, Ireland on March 22, 2013.—AFP wrong hands and that terrorists, jihadists, extremists would misuse these weapons,” Germany ’s Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle told reporters.

COMPROMISE The EU has until June 1 to decide whether to renew or amend its sanctions on Syria and discussions on what to do about the arms embargo will continue in EU working groups. Changing the arms ban needs the backing of all 27 EU states.

Without agreement, all EU measures against Syria, including asset freezes and travel bans, would collapse on June 1.

Hague and Fabius signaled their readiness

to compromise by saying in their letter that they would accept “some very serious amendment” of the arms embargo, short of its complete lifting.

The embargo was previously amended in February to allow non-lethal assistance for the opposition. Austrian Foreign Minister Michael Spindelegger said he could not see any reason for a compromise.

“We are totally against so I can’t see where there could be a compromise,” he said. If the arms embargo were to be lifted, Spindelegger said it would make it very difficult for Austria to leave several hundred troops on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights as part of a UN peacekeeping

force, because the EU would be perceived as taking sides in the Syria conflict.

Some opponents of lifting the arms embargo are ready to look at easing economic sanctions on rebel-held areas of Syria to try to strengthen the opposition.

One option would be to ease a ban on EU oil imports from Syria to permit opposition groups to sell oil to Europe, EU diplomats said. “We must look at how we can increase assistance to the moderate Syrian opposition, in particular through political and economic support,” Ashton said in a statement. Ministers would look at “all options” to help bring about a political solution in Syria, she said.— Reuters

‘The Terminator’ arrives at war crimes court jail

DAMARA: Rebels of the SELEKA coalition in the Central African Republic patrol on a road 12kms from the city of Damar. — AFP

Central African rebels close in on the capital BANGUI: Rebels in the Central African Republic advanced on the capital yesterday claiming they were at “the gates of Bangui”, after the collapse of a two-month-old peace deal. Troops from the Seleka rebel coalition shot their way through the key Damara checkpoint some 75 kilometers north of the capital, said a source with the Multinational Force of Central Africa (FOMAC), a regional stabilization mission which was manning the roadblock. “The rebels stormed the checkpoint and passed through.... There were shots but no wounded,” said the source on condition of anonymity. “They are on the road to Bangui. We’re on the highest alert.”

Colonel Djouma Narkoyo, a rebel chief contacted by AFP by telephone from Libreville, said: “We are at the gates of Bangui.

“I cannot tell you where, it is a military secret as well as our numbers, but Damara is behind us.” A French foreign ministry statement confirmed that the rebels were “only a few kilometers” from Bangui. Ministry spokesman Philippe Lalliot called for “all parties to show restraint and respect the civilian populations”.

Narkoyo said “the last barrier is the South Africans”, referring to South African troops on a stabilisation mission in the capital.

A South African helicopter had overflown their position, he said. “They fired on us below but there were no victims” from the attack.

His report could not be independently confirmed. The government denied the rebels had passed Damara in a statement on national radio, and urged residents of Bangui to not “give in to panic”. As reports of a rebel advance spread quickly in the capital, the streets emptied as people rushed home or

tried to flee the city. “Everyone is going home,” a shopkeeper said in a telephone interview. “Students have been released from classes. We’re waiting. We’re worried.”

One boat operator at the city’s port said hundreds of people were trying to cross the Ubangi river to seek shelter in neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo. “The indications that we have about Central Africa are worrying,” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said, adding France would do what was necessary to ensure its nationals were protected. The ministry said it had told around 1,000 French nationals who live in the former French colony to be vigilant.

President Francois Bozize met South African President Jacob Zuma in Pretoria on Friday, a government website there reported, but there were no details of their talks. In January, when the rebels were sweeping south towards the capital, Zuma sent 400 South African troops to the country to back efforts to stabilize the situation. But they were only due to stay until the end of March.

The latest rebel offensive came two days after Seleka announced it would resume hostilities after a deadline for the government to meet its demands under a January 11 peace deal expired. Seleka, an alliance of three rebel movements, first launched an offensive on December 10 in the north of the chronically unstable country. Facing little resistance from an ill-trained and ill-equipped army, the rebel forces-who accused Bozize of not respecting earlier peace deals-seized a string of key towns. They defied UN Security Council calls to stop, before halting within striking distance of Bangui.—AFP

KIGALI: A Congolese warlord known as “the Terminator” who is accused of murder, rape and other atrocities arrived at the International Criminal Court’s jail in the Netherlands early yesterday, the court said.

Bosco Ntaganda, who walked off the street and gave himself up at the US Embassy in Kigali in a surprise move on Monday, was flown in a private jet from the Rwandan capital to The Hague after being handed over to the court’s custody.

After a 15-year career that spanned a series of Rwandan-backed rebellions in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, he will appear in court on Tuesday for the first hearing in a process that could lead to him being put on trial for war crimes.

Ntaganda was most recently a commander in the M23 rebel movement, but his position weakened after the group split in two.

His removal from the conflict creates an opportunity to secure a peace agreement to end the year-old rebellion in a region dogged by conflicts. Ntaganda’s surrender was the first time an ICC suspect had voluntarily handed themselves over to be in the court’s custody.

He asked stunned US officials at the embassy to be transferred to the court, where he will face charges of recruiting child soldiers, murder, ethnic persecution, sexual slavery and rape during the 2002-3 conflict in northeastern Congo’s gold mining Ituri district. His whereabouts had been unknown after hundreds of his fighters fled into Rwanda or surrendered to UN peacekeepers last weekend following their defeat by a rival faction of M23 rebels in the mineral-rich eastern Congo. “Bosco thought his choice was the ICC or probable death,” said Jason Stearns of the Rift Valley

Institute. Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo said Ntaganda flew out of Kigali in the custody of ICC officials following cooperation between the Rwandan, US and Dutch governments. A Reuters witness had seen a blacked-out US Embassy vehicle under police escort drive along the perimeter of Kigali international airport. Shortly after, a private jet took off. His first courtroom appearance, to confirm his identity, will be on Tuesday morning, the court said in a statement.

With an arrest warrant hanging over him, Ntaganda and his backers were seen as an obstacle to peace between the M23 and the Congolese government that the rival faction had shown signs of warming to. “Bosco’s arrest won’t bring peace to the eastern Congo, but Bosco’s arrest does spell a victory in the battle against impunity and the dismantling of one of the barriers to a peace process in the country,” Stearns said.

The trial of Rwandan-born Ntaganda could prove an embarrassment to the Rwandan government, which has denied charges by a United Nations panel that it backs the M23 rebels.

ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda might seek to add additional charges related to rebellions that followed the alleged Ituri crimes, analysts said. Wars in Congo have killed about five million people in the past decade and a half, and many eastern areas are still afflicted by violence from a number of rebel groups despite a decade-long U.N. peacekeeping mission. “Bosco Ntaganda’s arrival in The Hague will be a major victory for victims of atrocities in eastern Congo,” said Geraldine Mattioli-Zeltner, international justice advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. — Reuters

SCHEVENINGEN: A car carrying the Congolese war crimes suspect Bosco Ntaganda arrives at the prison in The Hague’s seaside suburb of Scheveningen, The Netherlands.—AFP

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

I N T E R N AT I O N A L

Taleban threatens to assassinate Musharraf MIRANSHAH: The Pakistani Taleban yesterday threatened to assassinate former military ruler Pervez Musharraf when he returns to the country to contest elections after nearly five years in self-imposed exile. The 69-year-old escaped three assassination attempts when in office from 1999 to 2008, a target of Islamist extremists because of his alliance in the US-led “war on terror” and attempts to clamp down on militants. “We have prepared a special squad of suicide bombers for Musharraf,” Taleban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan said by telephone from an undisclosed location. “They will attack Musharraf after he arrives (in) Pakistan.”

Musharraf is due to fly into Karachi, his home town and Pakistan’s largest city of 18 million which is suffering from record levels of violence linked to ethnic and political tensions, on Sunday. When former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto returned to Karachi from eight years in exile on October 18, 2007, bomb attacks killed at least 139 people in what remains the deadliest single terror attack on Pakistani soil. She was later assassinated in a gun and suicide attack at the end of an election rally in Rawalpindi on December 27, 2007. Her son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, who is chairman of the Pakistan People’s

Party, has accused Musharraf of her murder.

Musharraf is wanted by the courts over Bhutto’s death, the 2006 death of Akbar Bugti, a Baluch rebel leader in the southwest, who died during a military operation, and for the 2007 sacking and illegal arrest of judges. He went to the top of the Taleban hit list after ordering the army to storm the Red Mosque in Islamabad, where radicals were holed up.

The operation left more than 100 people dead and opened the floodgates to Islamist attacks in Pakistan.

Taleban and Al-Qaeda-linked groups went on the rampage, carrying out hundreds of attacks that have killed more than 5,700 people according to an AFP tally. In an interview with AFP in Dubai on Friday, Musharraf said he was prepared to risk any danger to his life in order to stand for election on May 11, polls which should mark the first democratic transition of power in Pakistani history. “Two hundred percent! I am travelling back on Sunday to Pakistan,” he said. “I will go by land, air or sea... even to the peril of my life, this is the oath I took for the country.”

On Friday a court in Karachi granted him protective bail for at least 10 days on charges of conspiracy to murder and ille-

gally arresting judges, but analysts say the risk of arrest is less than the danger to his life. “Security will be a huge challenge for him,” retired lieutenant general Talat Masood said. It is not only the Pakistani Taleban, but Baluch groups, who hold him responsible for Bugti’s death, and hardline sectarian groups who want to kill him, said Masood. “Moreover he is arriving in Karachi where the security situation is very difficult. He wants to be part of the political landscape. He will have to move around to meet people and travel to other places,” the retired general said.

“I don’t know why he is taking the risk when he has not a bright future in Pakistan,” he added. Musharraf seized power in a bloodless coup when he was army chief of staff in 1999 and left the country after stepping down in August 2008, when Asif Ali Zardari was elected president. Last year he delayed a planned homecoming after being threatened with arrest and commentators say most of his powerbase has evaporated and that he will only secure, at most, a couple of seats for his All Pakistan Muslim League (APLM) party.

He has presented himself as “a third alternative” to the PPP and to opposition leader Nawaz Sharif, whom he ousted in 1999 and who is considered a frontrunner

DUBAI: Pakistan’s former military ruler Pervez Musharraf speaks during news conference in the Gulf emirate of Dubai yesterday. Musharraf said he would definitely return home today to contest historic elections in May and that he was prepared to risk any danger to his life. —AFP in the May vote, by promising to reverse economic decline and restore security. In 2010 a UN report said Bhutto’s death could have been prevented and accused Musharraf’s government of failing to pro-

vide her with adequate protection.

Musharraf ’s government blamed the assassination on Pakistani Taleban chief Baitullah Mehsud, who was killed in a US drone attack in August 2009. —AFP

In Moscow speech, China’s Xi warns against meddling China, Russia ties ‘guarantee global balance’

WASHINGTON: People begin lining up in front of the Supreme Court for the court’s upcoming coming hearings on gay marriage in Washington. The justices will hear arguments Tuesday on California’s Proposition 8 ban on samesex marriage and on Wednesday on the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between one man and one woman. —AFP

Gay marriage opponents in US put children first WASHINGTON: For opponents of same-sex marriage in the United States, it’s the welfare of children that is at stake when the US Supreme Court hears oral arguments on the hot button issue next week. “Children do best with a mother and father, and marriage is the most important social institution we have to connect moms and dads to their children,” said Thomas Peters of the National Organization for Marriage.

“In the first place, it’s for the interests of children,” Peters said ahead of the hearings that begin Tuesday when NOM and other groups that defend traditional marriage will be protesting on the court steps. Judicial and political analysts say that a Supreme Court decision on marriage equality could open the way to the full legalization of gay marriage, which is already recognized in nine states and the District of Columbia home to the US capital Washington.

“We are in favor of traditional marriage because it’s the way God intended it to be, between one man and one woman, for the fruitfulness and the multiplication of the human race,” said Preston Noell, president of Tradition, Family and Property, a co-organizer of Tuesday’s March for Marriage rally. “Same-sex marriage violates that principle,” he said. “It’s phony. It’s fake. It’s like counterfeit money.” Noell argued that marriage is “essentially a contract according to natural law” and an institution that predates both church and state. “It’s meant for raising children in a very good atmosphere so they can grow up be good citizens,” he said.

“If we take this away, we take away a mother or a father from the child. We make the child poorer, because the mother and father each have special gifts that God gave them, that help the child to understand the way the world is.” Growing up in a same-sex relationship, he said, “the child is going to suffer... Two mothers or two fathers, that’s not the same thing.” Paul Linton, a lawyer for the Family Research Council, one of the groups that will be putting forth arguments to the Supreme Court justices, said that American law has always defined marriage in heterosexual terms.

“Most of the Supreme Court decisions involving marriage (in the past) have spoken of procreation-which obviously can’t happen with the same-sex couples,” he said. Public opinion polls

indicate regularly that a majority of Americans favor marriage equality, but NOM spokesman Peters said: “The only poll that matters is a free and fair vote of the people.”

Thirty-one states to date have legal instruments in place that specify that marriage is exclusively a union between a man and a woman. To press their case, opponents of gay marriage have campaigned against the adoption of children by gay and lesbian couples. Such adoptions are banned in five states to date, but authorized in 18 and the District of Columbia. According to a study by the Williams Institute, a think tank that focuses on the LGBT community, nearly half of all lesbians in the United States, and one in five gay men under the age of 50, are now raising at least one child.

Out of around 650,000 same-sex couples, including 130,000 who are married, some 125,000 households are raising 220,000 biological children, adopted youngsters or step-children.

Robert Oscar Lopez, a 42-year-old English teacher who describes himself as a bisexual raised by two lesbians, one of whom was his biological mother, plans to attend the demonstration outside the Supreme Court. “Quite simply, growing up with gay parents was very difficult, and not because of prejudice from neighbors,” he said. “My peers learned all the unwritten rules of decorum and body language in their homes.

“They understood what was appropriate to say in certain settings and what wasn’t. They learned both traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine social mechanisms.” Sociologists and pediatricians, however, see little if any danger. “When the social science evidence is exhaustively examined... the facts demonstrate that children fare just as well when raised by same-sex parents,” the American Sociological Association says.

The American Academy of Pediatrics says that “children need secure and enduring relationships with committed and nurturing adults to enhance their life experiences for optimal social-emotional and cognitive development. “Scientific evidence affirms that children have similar developmental and emotional needs and receive similar parenting whether they are raised by parents of the same or different genders,” it added. —AFP

Lesbians hoping to wed after US ruling SAN FRANCISCO: A lesbian couple whose case will go before the US Supreme Court next week say they plan to marry “as soon as we can” if America’s top tribunal decides in their favor. Kris Perry and Sandy Stier are one of two gay couples from California whose legal fight to overturn the state’s same-sex marriage ban has ended up in the Supreme Court in Washington DC. “When we started out what we really hoped to do is have Proposition 8 repealed,” said Perry, referring to the measure approved by referendum in 2008 which outlawed gay marriage in California. “And the fact that we ended up in the highest court wasn’t really the intention, it wasn’t really expected, but here we are. “And so, for a family, it’s an important struggle, there has been

sacrifice and at the same time it’s a huge honor,” she added during a press conference in San Francisco. “Proposition 8 has been a really harmful and difficult chapter in our life.”

President Barack Obama last month threw his weight behind them when his administration filed a brief with the Supreme Court opposing California’s bid to ban same-sex unions. The US Department of Justice filed a brief to the court, arguing that Prop 8 violates the 14th Amendment to the Constitution which guarantees citizens equal rights. Perry and Stier have been together for 13 years and have four sons.

Perry is head of the First Five Years Fund, a body that invests in early childhood education programs for disadvantaged children. —AFP

MOSCOW: Chinese President Xi Jinping warned against foreign interference in the affairs of other nations during a speech in Moscow yesterday, sending a signal to the West and echoing a message often repeated

by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Permanent UN Security Council members with veto power, Russia and China have frequently teamed up diplomatically to blunt the influence of the United States and its NATO allies and have blocked three draft resolutions on Syria.

“We must respect the right of each country in the world to independently choose its path of development and oppose interference in the internal affairs of other countries,” Xi told students at an international relations school.

He was speaking a day after meeting Putin on his first foreign trip becoming president, a choice both said underscored a “strategic partnership” between Russia and China. “Strong Chinese-Russian relations ... not only answer to our interests but also serve as an important, reliable guarantee of an international strategic balance and peace,” Xi said.

Putin, who began a six-year term last May has often criticized foreign interference in sovereign states. Russia and China have resisted Western calls to pressure Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad over the two-year-old civil conflict that has killed more than 70,000 people. They both criticized the NATO bombing that helped rebels overthrow Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 and stood together in the Security Council in votes on the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs.

Both China and Russia have bristled at US

MOSCOW: Russia’s Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev (right) greets China’s President Xi Jinping during their meeting in Gorky residence outside Moscow yesterday. —AFP and European criticism of their human rights records. Putin said in a foreign policy decree issued at the start of his new term that Russia would counter attempts to use human rights as a pretext for interference, and his government has cracked down on foreign-funded

non-governmental organizations. After Russia, Xi will visit Tanzania, the Republic of Congo and South Africa, where he and Putin are expected to meet again at a summit of the BRICS group of emerging economies this week. —Reuters

What’s at stake in UN arms trade treaty negotiations?

UNITED NATIONS: Members of the United Nations have been meeting at the world body’s New York City headquarters this week for a final round of negotiations on what could become the first international treaty to regulate the $70 billion global conventional arms trade. The treaty drafting conference will continue until March 28. Following are questions and answers about the draft arms trade treaty.

WHAT IS THE ARMS TRADE TREATY? The point of an arms trade treaty is to set standards for all cross-border transfers of any type of conventional weapon - light and heavy.

It would also create binding requirements for nations to review all cross-border arms contracts to ensure the munitions will not be used in human rights abuses, terrorism, violations of humanitarian law, do not breach UN arms embargoes and are not illegally diverted. It would require governments to refuse to export weapons to countries that would likely use them to violate human rights or commit war crimes. It would also require governments to regulate arms brokering.

WHAT WEAPONS WOULD BE COVERED? The current draft treaty says that the following weapon types will be covered by the pact “at a minimum”: battle tanks; armored combat vehicles; large-caliber artillery systems; combat aircraft; attack helicopters; warships; missiles and missile launchers; small arms and light weapons, ranging from assault rifles to handguns. It would not cover unconventional weapons like nuclear, chemical and biological arms. Separate treaties cover those.

WHO WANTS SUCH A TREATY? Human rights groups, arms control advocates and a majority of the United Nations’ 193 member states want a strong treaty that imposes tough new standards on the largely unregulated arms trade. Many of the treaty’s most ardent supporters come from Europe, Latin America and Africa, though it has supporters from all over the world. Some 108 countries, led

by Mexico, issued a joint statement on Monday saying “the overwhelming majority of (UN) Member States agree with us on the necessity and the urgency of adopting a strong Arms Trade Treaty. Our voice must be heard.”

Among that statement’s supporters were major arms producers Britain and Germany. The other four top arms exporters - the United States, Russia, China and France - did not endorse it. The five permanent Security Council members - the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia - issued their own joint statement of support for a treaty that “sets the highest possible common standards by which states will regulate the international transfer of conventional arms.” The five also said that “an effective (treaty) should not hinder the legitimate arms trade or the legitimate right to self defense under the UN Charter.”

The main reason the arms trade talks are taking place at all is that the United States - the world’s biggest arms trader - reversed US policy on the issue after President Barack Obama was first elected and decided in 2009 to support a treaty. Delegates have expressed concern that other major arms producers like Iran, Pakistan and others might take issue with some of the provisions in the treaty and demand the inclusion of language that weakens it and adds loopholes. Since the treaty-drafting conference works on the basis of consensus, any country can veto the outcome if it chooses to do so.

WHAT WILL ARMS TREATY NOT DO? According to the UN Office of Disarmament, it will not do any of the following: interfere with domestic arms commerce or the right to bear arms in member states; ban the export of any type of weapon; harm states’ legitimate right to self-defense; undermine national arms regulation standards already in place. The National Rifle Association, the powerful US gun lobby group, is strongly opposed to the arms trade treaty. The group has vowed to fight the convention’s ratification by the US Senate if Washington backs it at the United Nations. The NRA says the treaty would undermine gun ownership rights under the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. The American Bar Association, an attorneys’ lobbying group, last month disputed the NRA position, saying in a paper that “ratification of the treaty would not infringe upon rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment.”

WHAT HAPPENS IF CONFERENCE FAILS? If the conference fails to agree to a treaty

because it cannot reach the required consensus, delegates say they can put it to a vote in the UN General Assembly to rescue it. Either way, if a treaty is approved, national legislatures will need to ratify it. Here are the sticking points; AMMUNITION Most countries and rights groups want ammunition to be covered comprehensively in the treaty. Exports of ammunition are covered in the draft treaty but not imports. The United States has said it opposes inclusion of ammunition.

SELF-DEFENSE Some delegations are insisting that the draft include more language on the right of countries to legitimate self-defense. That is because some major arms-importing states, especially in the Middle East, have expressed concern that their ability to import weapons could suffer if the treaty comes into force.

RISK OF DIVERSION Some countries want the risk of diversion of weapons to unintended recipients, such as rebel groups or governments under a UN arms embargo, to be a criterion for refusing to grant an export license.

OVERRIDING The current draft says that arms exports should be canceled if there is an “overriding” risk that they could be used in human rights violations. Some countries have suggested that a better threshold would be if there is a “substantial” risk involved.

EXEMPTIONS There are a number of scenarios under which arms deals would be exempt in the current draft, such as defense cooperation agreements - something India wanted - and gifts and loans of weapons. Supporters of a tough treaty call them loopholes and want them removed.

REPORTING There is disagreement over whether required reports on arms trade should be made public. Countries like China, Iran and others oppose making them public. —Reuters

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

I N T E R N AT I O N A L

Philippine militants free Australian held for 15 months PAGADIAN: Australian Warren Rodwell emerged yesterday withered from 15 months as a captive of Islamic militants in the lawless southern Philippines, his ribs protruding but able to smile. Rodwell, a former soldier, 54, joked with policemen and a journalist who took exclusive video footage of him for AFP at Pagadian city police station on Mindanao island, shortly after his pre-dawn release. “Lose weight... skeleton,” a smiling Rodwell said as he took off his T-shirt for the video camera and pointed at ribs that could be seen hard up against his skin. He then sucked in his stomach to accentuate his weight loss.

Rodwell was clean shaven, except for a moustache, and his hair was cut neatly. The Philippine military said Rodwell had been released at Pagadian, a port city about 100 kilometers east of Ipil town where he had been living with his Filipina wife before he was kidnapped on December 5, 2011. Islamic militants posing as policemen broke into his house and abducted him, and had initially demanded $2 million. Philippine and Australian authorities refused to say yesterday if any ransom had been paid to secure his release.

The kidnappers, members of the Abu Sayyaf militant group, had previously released a series of video clips of Rodwell as

proof he was still in their custody and which showed him becoming progressively gaunt.

In the last video, apparently taken in January, masked militants carrying M-16 automatic rifles and belts of ammunition threatened to kill Rodwell as he sat with his hands bound by rope. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard expressed relief over Rodwell’s release and congratulated Philippine authorities for their handling of the case.

“I do want to pay tribute to the government of the Philippines and their agencies and personnel, they worked so hard to secure Rodwell’s release,” Gillard told reporters. After a brief stay in Pagadian, Rodwell was flown by helicopter to a military base in Zamboanga, one of the major cities in the southern Philippines, where he received medical treatment. Two soldiers had to support Rodwell as he hobbled away from the helicopter and into a van, according to video footage released by the Philippine military. The media were not allowed access to him at the base.

The Abu Sayyaf is one of many armed Islamist groups operating in the southern Philippines, which has been home to a deadly Muslim separatist insurgency that has cost tens of thousands of lives since the 1970s. The group is believed to have only a few hundred militants but has been blamed

for the worst terror attacks in recent Philippine history. It also has a long history of kidnapping foreigners, Christians and local business people for ransom. Many foreign governments warn their citizens to avoid the violence-plagued parts of the southern Philippines because of the high risk of kidnappings.

But Rodwell settled in Ipil with his Filipina wife, Miraflor Gutang, about eight months before he was abducted, according to local authorities. He had worked as a teacher in China before marrying Gutang, whom he met on the Internet. While the Abu Sayyaf claims to be motivated by a quest for an independent Muslim homeland in the southern Philippines, local authorities regard the group as primarily a kidnap-for-ransom gang.

It is believed to be holding other hostages, including some foreigners. The Abu Sayyaf was set up in the early 1990s with funding from the Al-Qaeda network.

About 600 US Special Forces troops have been rotating in the southern Philippines since 2002 to train Filipino troops how to quash the Abu Sayyaf. However the Abu Sayyaf has remained an enduring threat, partly because the militants operate with the support of local Muslim communities. —AFP

ZAMBOANGA: Australian hostage Warren Richard Rodwell (center) arrives at the Command’s headquarters in Zamboanga city in southern Philippines following his release yesterday. —AP

China to attend major US-hosted exercises China’s involvement ‘limited, adhere to US law WASHINGTON: China’s People’s Liberation Army has accepted an invitation to participate for the first time in a major US-hosted naval drill, but legal restrictions will limit its role to less sensitive exercises, like disaster relief, US officials say.

Beijing’s agreement to join the drills being held next year comes at a moment of heightened tensions between China and US ally Japan over disputed East China Sea islets, and unease in the United States about China’s rapid military buildup and its cyber capabilities.

The Rim of the Pacific exercise, known as RIMPAC, is billed as the world’s largest international maritime exercise, with 22 nations and more than 40 ships and submarines participating the last time it was held off Hawaii in 2012. Not all the participants are treaty allies with the United States. Last year’s participants included Russia and India.

But China has never participated in the event, although it did send observers to RIMPAC in 1998, the Pentagon said. Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter acknowledged China had agreed to participate in RIMPAC during a little-noticed speech on Wednesday in Jakarta.

Carter said he was “delighted that they have accepted” the American invitation, extended last

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un (right) presents a memorial automatic rifle while visiting Unit 1973 headquarters at an undisclosed location. North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un has inspected a feared special forces unit, ordering them to strike at “lightning speed” once war breaks out. —AFP

China punishes North Korea as Washington asks for more BEIJING: China is trying to punish ally North Korea for its nuclear and missile tests, stepping up inspections of North Korean-bound cargo in a calibrated effort to send a message of Chinese pique without further provoking a testy Pyongyang government. Freight handlers and trading companies at ports and cities near the North Korean border complain of more rigorous inspections and surprise checks that are raising the costs to doing business with an often unpredictable North Korea. Machinery, luxury goods and daily necessities such as rice and cooking oil are among the targeted products, the companies said, and business is suffering.

“Some business orders we don’t dare take.

We don’t dare do that business because we fear that after the orders are taken, we will end up unable to ship them,” said Hu, an executive with Dalian Fast International Logistics Co. in the northeastern port city of Dalian, across the Yellow Sea from the North Korean port of Nampo. Hu said the company’s business is off by as much as 20 percent this year. North Korea’s economic lifeline, China is showing signs of getting tough with an impoverished neighbor it has long supported with trade, aid and diplomatic protection for fear of setting off a collapse.

The moves to crimp, but not cut off trade with North Korea come as Beijing falls under increased scrutiny to enforce new UN sanctions passed after last month’s nuclear test, Pyongyang’s third. Targeted in the sanctions are the bank financing and bulk smuggling of cash that could assist North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs as well as the luxury goods that sustain the ruling elite around leader Kim Jong Un. Pyongyang has reacted with fury and threatening rhetoric against South Korea and the US. US officials in Beijing for two days of talks to lobby China on enforcement said Friday that they were heartened by Chinese expressions of resolve. Spurring Beijing to cooperate, the US officials said, is a concern that North Korean behavior had begun threatening China’s interests in a region vital to its economic and security. “There’s reason to believe the Chinese are looking at the threat in a real way,” Treasury Undersecretary David Cohen told reporters.

China’s change of tack with North Korea

unlikely foreshadows a total end to Beijing’s support. For Beijing, North Korea remains a pivotal strategic buffer between China and a U.S.-allied South Korea, and Chinese leaders worry that too much pressure could upend an already fragile North Korean economy and cause the Kim government to collapse, leaving Beijing with a security headache and possible refugee crisis. But North Korea watchers said between blind support and complete abandonment there’s much Beijing is doing and can do to try to rein in Pyongyang.

“We have to get away from the binary thinking that either they support North Korea or they pull the plug. That’s not the way the world works,” said Jonathan Pollack of the Brookings Institution, a Washington think-tank. “The interesting thing is not what happens at the UN but what happens beneath the radar in terms of what Chinese provide in economic aid and energy assistance.” Over the past decade, as previous nuclear and long-range missile tests and other provocations saw the UN, the US, South Korea and Japan impose sanctions and reduce trade and assistance to North Korea, China has stepped into the breach.

By 2011, China provided nearly all of North Korea’s fuel and more than 83 percent of its imports, everything from heavy machinery to grain and electronics and other consumer goods, according to statistics from the International Trade Center, a research arm of the United Nations and World Trade Organization. Though Pyongyang could look to other trading partners like Russia, Iran or Kuwait for fuel and some other goods, China’s proximity - their shared 1,400-kilometer border - makes it indispensable.

Chinese companies, often with backed by the government, are enlarging North Korean ports and building roads, helping to underpin growth after more than a decade of famine and economic decay. Such was the Chinese support that US politicians and UN experts complained that Beijing was failing to enforce previous rounds of sanctions, particularly on luxury goods. The $169,000 worth of pleasure boats imported

by North Korea last year all came from China, the ITC data show, as did most of the liquor and cigarettes. —AP

year by then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. At the time, Panetta said he asked China to send a ship to the exercises. Beijing said later it would give the offer “positive consideration.”

“We seek to strengthen and grow our militaryto-military relationship with China, which matches and follows our growing political and economic relationship,” Carter said, according to prepared remarks on the Defense Department’s website.

US law prohibits the Pentagon from any military contacts with the PLA if it could “create a national security risk due to an inappropriate exposure” to activities including joint combat operations.

There is an exemption for operations or exercises related to search and rescue and humanitarian relief, and China participated with the United States last year in a counter-piracy drill.

‘SECURITY SAFEGUARDS’ Lieutenant Colonel Catherine Wilkinson, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said China’s participation in RIMPAC would adhere to US law and noted precautions taken by the Navy in drills to avoid revealing sensitive information. “The US Navy has operational security safeguards to protect US technology and tactics, techniques and procedures from disclosure,” Wilkinson said.

Dean Cheng, an analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank, questioned whether Chinese intelligence operatives would not benefit from their participation in RIMPAC, which also includes live-fire exercises by key US allies.

“If they have a frigate, or even a hospital ship, in the middle of that exercise, the hospital ship is going to be staffed by intelligence officers,” Cheng said. He noted that if the drills were designed in a way that was unhelpful to the Chinese, they would also be unhelpful to allies.

Wilkinson declined to speculate about which drills China might participate in, noting the agenda had not yet been set for next year’s event.

“US-China military-to-military engagements can include a range of activities in areas of mutual interest including maritime security, military medicine and humanitarian assistance/disaster relief,” she said. Commander Charles Brown, a spokesman for the Navy’s Third Fleet, said the initial planning conference for RIMPAC 2014 would take place in May. “We’re proud of our ability to design an exercise that everyone feels meets their objectives and is comfortable with,” Brown said. —Reuters

Thai fire death toll rises to 42 BANGKOK: The toll from a blaze that swept through a camp in northern Thailand has risen to 42, a Thai official said yesterday, after hundreds of temporary homes for refugees from Myanmar were reduced to ashes. Dozens of people were injured in the fire, which broke out on Friday at the Mae Surin camp in Mae Hong Son province, with women, children and the elderly believed to make up the majority of the victims. Rescue workers were on the scene at the remote mountainous camp area, Mae Hong Son provincial governor Narumol Paravat said by telephone. “The latest death toll we can confirm through military walkie-talkies is 42,” she said, adding the toll was likely to rise further as rescue workers search the area. Authorities believe the fire was sparked by an unattended cooking flame.

A local district official said hot weather, combined with strong winds caused the fire to spread quickly among the thatched bamboo shelters.

Police yesterday said around 400 temporary homes had been incinerated, while the Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Bureau said a school, clinic and two food warehouses had also been destroyed.

The Thai government pledged an investigation into the fire at the camp, which houses roughly 3,700 refugees. Ten camps strung out along the Thai-Myanmar border house a total of about 130,000 people, who first began arriving in the 1980s. Many of the refugees have fled conflict zones in ethnic areas of Myanmar, also known as Burma. Families often live cheek-by-jowl in simple bamboo-and-thatch dwellings. Many of the camp residents have been registered with the UN as refugees, and an ongoing resettlement program has allowed tens of thousands to move to third countries.

After a new quasi-civilian government replaced the long-ruling junta in Myanmar two years ago, Thailand announced it wanted to shut the border camps, raising concern among their residents. But so far the displaced residents have been allowed to stay and the Thai government has stressed that it will only send them back when it is safe. Many of the refugees are from Myanmar’s eastern Karen state, where a major rebel group, the K aren National Union (KNU) signed a ceasefire deal with the new regime last year after decades of civil war.

Vast numbers of people fled the former Myanmar junta’s counter-insurgency campaign, which rights groups say deliberately targeted civilians, driving them from their homes, destroying villages and forcing them to work for the army. Years of war have left the Karen region littered with landmines while development has been held back, leaving dilapidated infrastructure and threadbare education and health services. Hundreds of homes were destroyed at a different border camp in February last year by a fire that the authorities also blamed on cooking. —AFP

MEIKTILA: Residents ride a motorcycle past a military truck in riot-hit Meiktila, central Myanmar yesterday. —AFP

Soldiers patrol the streets of riot-hit Myanmar town MEIKTILA: Troops patrolled the streets of a central Myanmar town yesterday after Buddhist-Muslim unrest tore through the area leaving at least 20 dead and spurring the government to declare emergency rule. Around 50 military trucks were deployed in Meiktila, where homes and mosques have been torched by mobs armed with knives and sticks in three days of communal rioting.

“We do not know what we will do in the future.

Most of us want to go back home if there is peace under the military,” said one displaced man at the town’s sports ground, which has become a makeshift refuge for hundreds of local Muslims.

“There was no proper control in recent days. We welcome the soldiers coming into the town, they can give us security.” The clashes are the latest sign of worsening tensions between Muslims and Buddhists, presenting a serious challenge for the quasi-civilian regime as it looks to reform the country after decades of iron-fisted military rule.

Violence in Meiktila, 130 kilometers north of the capital Naypyidaw, began on Wednesday after an apparent argument in a gold shop spiraled into pitched battles. Mosques have been reduced to ashes, while gangs of young men, including monks, have roamed the streets. It is the worst communal violence since a wave of clashes between Buddhists and Muslims in the western state of Rakhine last year that left at least 180 people dead and more than 110,000 displaced.

The state of emergency order, signed by President Thein Sein, is designed to enable the army to help restore order and is a significant move in a country trying to emerge from the legacy of junta rule, which ended two years ago.

Meiktila remained tense yesterday, although no new clashes were reported. “We do not have an exact death toll yet as we are still trying to collect the figures,” a senior government official in

Meiktila town said, adding that troops had brought relative calm to the area and a clean-up operation was under way. Although the chaotic nature of the situation made precise casualty numbers difficult to obtain, local police said Friday that at least 20 people have died, while state media yesterday put the official death toll at 11 with 39 injured. A report in the English language New Light of Myanmar said more than 150 homes and 13 religious buildings were damaged in the unrest. The United Nations, US, Britain and rights groups have called for calm and dialogue between communities amid fears that the violence could spread.

Journalists in the town have seen the charred remains of bodies on the roadside, while one group of reporters was threatened at knife-point by a group of men and monks who forced them to hand over their camera memory sticks. Kyaw Kyaw, a 27-year-old Muslim religious leader who has lived in the town since his childhood, said he was not sure what was behind the sudden explosion of violence. “We could not take anything when we left our homes. We had to run for our lives... We have been living with Buddhists for many years. I am very upset about what has happened,” he said on Friday.

Myanmar’s Muslims-largely of Indian, Chinese and Bangladeshi descent-account for an estimated four percent of the population of roughly 60 million, although the country has not conducted a census in three decades. Religious violence has occasionally broken out in the past in some areas across the country, with Rakhine state a flashpoint for the tensions. Since violence broke out there last year, thousands of Muslim Rohingya-including a growing number of women and children-have fled the conflict in rickety boats, many heading for Malaysia. —AFP

NEWS

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

Netanyahu apologizes to Erdogan...

Two popes meet

World landmarks go...

Continued from Page 1

Continued from Page 1

Continued from Page 1

There is no record of the two ever meeting post-resignation.

Cardinals in a conclave last week elected Francis - Latin America’s first pontiff and the first non-European pontiff in nearly 1,300 years. The Vatican said Benedict followed television news coverage of Francis’s election from Castel Gandolfo.

Yesterday’s talks were private and very little is likely to emerge about their content - with any number of urgent issues for a troubled Roman Catholic Church possibly on the agenda. The two leaders of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics are both preoccupied with issues ranging from rising secularism in Western countries to the reform of Vatican bureaucracy to the ongoing scandal over the sexual abuse of children by clerics. The two men - Francis is 76 and Benedict is 85 - have very different styles but important core similarities on matters of doctrine and ways forward for the Church after Benedict’s often difficult eight-year pontificate.

Francis has paid homage to Benedict and has called him twice since becoming pope. Analysts say Francis will rely heavily on the theological legacy of the former pope. Benedict, just before his momentous resignation, also pledged allegiance to whomever his successor might be. He has said he will live “hidden from the world” as a “simple pilgrim” on life’s last journey and is expected next month to move back and live in a former nunnery on Vatican grounds in a life of prayer and academic research. — AFP

had people dancing in the dark ahead of a film screening.

India’s capital New Delhi switched off floodlights at some of its iconic monuments including Qutab Minar, Humayun’s Tomb and the sprawling Red Fort. Many more of the world’s most iconic attractions, including the Empire State Building in New York, the Kremlin in Moscow and Paris’ Eiffel Tower were due to take part later.

While more than 150 countries joined in last year’s event, the movement has spread even further afield this year, with Palestine, Tunisia, Suriname and Rwanda among a host of newcomers pledging to take part. Earth Hour originated in Sydney with a simple appeal to people and businesses to turn off their lights for an hour to raise awareness about carbon pollution.

“What started as an event in Sydney in 2007 with two million people has now become a tradition across the country and across the world,” said Dermot O’Gorman, head of WWF-Australia.

“It’s now an organic, people-powered movement... which is fantastic.”

Other newcomers to be plunged into darkness include Copenhagen’s Little Mermaid, the statue of David in Florence and Cape Town’s Table Mountain. “I think the power of Earth Hour is in its ability to connect people and connect them on an issue that they really care about which is the environment,” said O’Gorman as the city stood in darkness. — AFP

a four-day stay in the Middle East designed to assure Israel he is serious about its defence from Iran and to keep Israeli-Palestinian peace hopes alive.

Obama also warned on Friday that he was worried that Syria could become an enclave of “extremism” as his own policy towards the vicious sectarian war threatening to tear the nation apart came under scrutiny. “(Extremists) are very good about exploiting situations that, you know, are no longer functioning.

They fill that gap,” Obama said at a news conference with King Abdullah II. Obama’s reluctance to arm opposition groups in Syria, fearing they are, or could become, extremist Islamist foes with links to AlQaeda, dogged him during questioning by journalists. On Friday, a Jordanian reporter asked him why superpower America had no plan to end the killing in Syria, prompting Obama to defend US diplomatic efforts to isolate Syria and to note hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid.

He also said he would ask Congress to provide $200 million in budget support for Jordan this year

as it cares for more than 450,000 Syrian refugees.

“This will mean more humanitarian assistance and basic services, including education for Syrian children so far from home, whose lives have been upended,” he said. At least 120,000 Syrian refugees are in the sprawling northern border camp of Zaatari alone, and Jordan has repeatedly complained that the growing numbers of Syrians, expected to reach 700,000 this year, are draining its resources. Obama also warned during his visit that the use of chemical weapons by Syria’s armed forces would be a game changer that would invite international action.

He wrapped up his first visit to Israel as president on Friday by giving Netanyahu, with whom he had feuded in his first term, a hug. The centrepiece of Obama’s visit to Israel was a powerful direct appeal to young Israelis on Thursday when he declared the two-state peace solution was very much alive and their only hope of true security, urging them to try to see the situation through Palestinian eyes. He also accepted that Israel had a right to ensure its self-defence, but urged time for his diplomatic push to work to halt Iran’s controversial nuclear program. — AFP

14

ANALYSIS

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

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Issues

EU rescue may tilt Cyprus from Moscow

By Luke Baker n a hot morning in July last year, Cypriot President Demetris Christofias sat with a group of journalists on the stage of the sleekly modern National Theatre in Nicosia and beamed as he talked about his warm ties with Russia. The communist party leader, who met his wife and earned his doctorate in Moscow, told the Brussels-based reporters that Cyprus could easily overcome its financial troubles with help from both Russia and the European Union. “ The Russians, as good friends of Cyprus, want to take care of us,” he said breezily, dismissing a question with a wave of his hand and smiling, his dark eyebrows rising with amusement towards his thick grey hair. “We could combine both,” the 66-year-old said when asked if he would rather take aid from Russia or the European Union.

Nine months on, that confidence appears to have been dangerously misplaced. Christofias, whose government took a €2.5 billion ($3.2 billion) loan from Moscow in 2011, is no longer the president of Cyprus and is not involved in the torrid efforts to try to agree a bailout package with the EU and IMF. But the gap between his perception of events then and the current state of affairs is illustrative of the dilemma facing this small island, where the geopolitical interests of Russia, the EU, Greece and Turkey collide.

If Cyprus had any hopes left that Moscow might provide funds to help bail it out, they were dashed on Friday when Cypriot Finance Minister Michael Sarris left Russia empty handed after days of negotiations. “The talks have ended as far as the Russian side is concerned,” Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said, with no agreement even to extend the existing, 4-1/2year loan. That leaves Cyprus isolated, having earlier rejected Europe’s bailout plan. To prevent its banks collapsing, it must now return cap in hand to Brussels. “It was very naive of Cyprus to think that Russia was going to help it out,” said Jana Kobzova, a policy fellow and Russia expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Nicosia seemed to calculate that because of the vital role Cypriot banks play as a base for Russian funds, Moscow could not afford not to help out, she said. At the same time, it thought Russia’s involvement would prompt the EU to compete for influence, allowing Cyprus to secure better EU aid terms. “Both assumptions were not based on reality,” said Kobzova.

The net result is a divided island - Turkey has occupied the northern third since 1974 - sitting in the southeastern Mediterranean, where 800,000 people face the prospect of an economic implosion that could leave them destitute. Its business model, based on low corporate taxes, attractive banking terms, tourism and real estate, is effectively finished, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel telling members of the German parliament on Friday that it had to change.

But a miscalculation over Russian and EU aid is not the only issue for Cyprus. The crisis may change the influential role it has played in geopolitics for the last 60 years. Britain, Russia, Turkey, Greece, Lebanon and Israel all have interests in Cyprus, whether military, cultural, historical, economic or political. While a member of the EU, Cyprus is not in NATO, yet has good ties with most NATO powers except Turkey. Whether it is the conflict in Syria, with the EU suspecting that Russian arms have been shipped to Damascus via Cyprus, or Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah in 2006 which saw tens of thousands of Lebanese refugees flee to the island, Cyprus often finds itself drawn into global affairs.

The fact Russia has decided against providing aid makes it all but certain that the final bailout agreed for Cyprus will be a solely EU-IMF affair - unless Nicosia takes the decision to go it alone, which would mean it would probably have to leave the euro currency and the EU. If Cyprus accepts an EU-IMF package, it means that for the next 3-5 years its economy will be closely monitored by EU officials, with the banking sector greatly wound down and the overall business model for the island changed. That could prompt Russian investors - and other wealthy external depositors - to pull out, leaving Cyprus ever more in the bosom of the European Union. Developments in Cyprus could prove significant for Turkey too. It has been looking to join the EU for decades. Cyprus objects. A more pliant Cyprus under an EU-IMF program may open the way for a resolution of the 40-year standoff with the Turkish Cypriot north of the island, which in turn could alter the balance of EU-Turkey relations. — Reuters

O

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Obama scores unexpected successes

By Crispian Balmer President Barack Obama flew out of Israel in a duststorm on Friday, leaving behind a trail of symbolic gestures and fine oratory that should help preserve the status quo at a time of regional upheaval. In an unexpected diplomatic flourish, he also facilitated a surprise telephone call between the prime ministers of Israel and Turkey, putting two US allies firmly on track to revive a once close relationship that had become badly frayed. Obama set such low expectations for the three-day trip that he can easily proclaim it is mission accomplished, having wooed sceptical Israelis, eased their fears over Iran and shown Palestinians that he had not forgotten their aspirations.

True, many Palestinians remained disillusioned, feeling that Obama had buckled to Israeli pressure and backtracked from his previous demands for a halt to Jewish settlement building in the occupied West Bank on land they want for a future state. But after a bruising first term of failed Middle East diplomacy, Obama’s prime concern seems to be that the situation does not get any worse, while keeping alive slender hopes that a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian peace deal is still possible.

“This visit marks a resumption of American attention to the conflict, which is very important after two years of utter absence from the scene,” said Ghassan Al-Khatib, an academic and a former Palestinian government spokesman. “It probably won’t lead to any new negotiations, which in any case would be meaningless given the huge gulf between the two sides. But it might bring some accountability to the Israelis.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared highly satisfied by the public show of joviality displayed by Obama during their meetings, dispelling the frosty scowls and sniping that marked encounters over the previous four years. “The atmosphere was much better than in all their meetings before,” said a senior Israeli official. “He gave the impression that he really wanted to start afresh,” he said of Obama.

Obama has already spent more time talking to Netanyahu than to any other world leader, according to the White House, and the pair put several more hours on the clock through this week.

Iran topped their initial agenda, aides said, with Obama seeking to build mutual trust and convince Israel that he was serious when he said he would not let Iran get nuclear weapons. As a joint news conference on Wednesday, Netanyahu repeated that Israel had a right to defend its own national interests, but added that he was “absolutely convinced” Obama meant what he said - a strong statement seen as significant by some analysts.

“Now I think there is almost complete understanding between Israel and the United States on the Iranian issue,” said Amotz AsaEl, fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

“Specifically, they are waiting to see if the June election in Iran ignites some kind of social upheaval, a prospect that both Washington and Jerusalem obviously prefer,” he added, referring to a mid-year presidential poll. Israel and Western powers believe Iran is looking to prepare a nuclear arsenal - something Tehran denies, while defending its right to enrich uranium for civil uses.

Netanyahu has set a “red line” across Iran’s progress on enrich-

US

ment, which he has said could be crossed in the spring or summer - hinting at unilateral military action unless the Islamic republic backs down.

Giora Eiland, a retired general and former Israeli national security adviser, said the prospect of such an attack was receding: “I think that the option still exists,” he said, “But that every day that passes lowers its chances of success.” Reflecting Israel’s isolation in a largely hostile region, Obama engineered a call between Netanyahu and his Turkish counterpart on Friday, enabling the two US allies to overcome a diplomatic crisis sparked by the deaths of nine Turks in 2010 during an Israeli commando raid off the Gaza Strip.

The move to normalise relations with a NATO member state that was one of its few Muslim friends in the region could help coordination to contain spillover from the Syrian civil war. “Given what we see in the Middle East, we see a situation in which our relations with Turkey can be very, very important for the future, regarding what happens with Syria, but not just what happens with Syria,” said a source in Netanyahu’s office.

Yet if the tensions with Turkey unexpectedly eased, Obama’s visit did little to raise hopes that the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict was any nearer resolution. Going over the heads of Israeli

leaders, who have questioned whether they have a viable negotiating partner on the other side of the separation barrier that twists through the West Bank, Obama appealed directly to ordinary citizens to push for change. In a powerful speech to appreciative students, the US president warned on Thursday that the Jewish state risked growing international isolation without a peace accord.

However, he did not bring any proposals on how to resume negotiations, which broke down in 2010, and he backed away from a previous demand for Israel to end settlement building, simply calling the construction an impediment to peace. He promised that his new secretary of state, John Kerry, would dedicate much time and energy to the problem, but many Israelis saw his comments as a sign Washington would distance itself from a diplomatic quagmire familiar to his predecessors.

“The era when the USA pushed Israel and the Palestinians into a political process is gone,” said Gidi Grinstein, president of the Reut Institute, a Tel Aviv-based think tank. “In the absence of American vision and strategy, considering Obama’s priorities and with the present positions of Israel and the Palestinians, the USA is basically saying: ‘You call us. We won’t call you’,” he added.—Reuters

Obama cooks up hope, dismay

By Stephen Collinson resident Barack Obama conjured images of Zionist delight and Palestinian despair on a tour which revived his engagement in the Middle East but came up against stubborn obstacles to progress. Tweaking emotions of Israelis, Obama sketched a searing picture of “a Palestinian child (who) cannot grow up in a state of her own.” Under a glaring Jerusalem sun, he laid stones on the graves of Theodor Herzl, founder of modern Zionism and Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli leader killed by a Jewish extremist for trying to make peace. And in drama on an airport tarmac, Obama engineered a revival of relations between US allies Israel and Turkey, after coaxing an apology out of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for Turkish deaths in a raid on a Gaza flotilla. But despite grand gestures for which Obama is known, it remained unlikely after he left Jordan that he had significantly reshaped the region’s snakepit politics. And there were questions about just how deeply Obama would engage in the grunt work of diplomacy, now the drama of the political moment has passed. Obama massaged every inch of Israel’s self-image, lauding an ancient Jewish homeland, a haven from persecution, empathising with his hosts’ sense of threatened isolation and their pride in a new hi-tech industry.

He scored two key wins, by removing the slur flung by foes at home and abroad that he has no affinity for the Jewish state. And after a back-slapping news conference, Obama also repaired his brittle relationship with Netanyahu

P

- at least in public. Obama’s homage to Israel’s iconic sites was a corrective after he worried Israelis with his 2009 Cairo speech to the Muslim world. “By laying a wreath at Herzl’s grave - an act that other foreign leaders have refused to do President Obama was reaffirming Zionism and the idea of a Jewish state,” Israel’s US ambassador Michael Oren told Haaretz. Jerusalem Post columnist Herb Keinon wrote it was important for Israelis, who wanted to be loved, to have Obama visit them in their rough neighbourhood. “Having the most powerful man in the world come and give us a public bear hug is very important.” Obama’s show of love for Israelis also came with an appeal: force your leaders to make peace with Palestinians because it is just, possible and the only way to ensure the Jewish state’s survival. A storm on Friday scuppered Obama’s plans to fly by helicopter to Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, so he took his motorcade through the West Bank separation wall.

At home or abroad, Obama looks out from his “Beast” limousine at crowds wowed by a statement of American power: a few months back he was mobbed as a liberating hero in Myanmar. But in the West Bank, rows of sullen Palestinians gazed on in contempt, arms crossed in a show of indifference. In Ramallah, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas appeared disgruntled, following Obama’s refusal to reinstate his call for a ban on Israeli settlement building as a condition of peace talks. There was a palpable feeling among Palestinians of busted expectations for Obama, even if US officials say Palestinians are partly to blame for the failure of his lofty calls for statehood. — AFP

Despite ouster plans, Leno leads ratings

By David Bauder ay Leno and the “Tonight” show is one of the few remaining successful programs that NBC has on its network. So why would its executives think about getting rid of him? NBC has confirmed that it is building a new studio for Jimmy Fallon at its New York headquarters but refuses to comment on reports that Fallon is due to replace Leno on a New York-based “Tonight” show as early as next year. With Leno already taking potshots at network executives regularly in his monologue, the network risks repeating the nightmare of 2010, when Conan O’Brien failed at “Tonight” and NBC brought Leno back.

“They seem to be making the same mistakes over and over again with a new regime,” said Christine Becker, an associate professor at Notre Dame University and author of the News For TV Majors blog. “You kind of wonder what’s in the water at NBC that is making them make that decision.”

On its face, such a move would seem like a proactive strategy from NBC’s new corporate owners at Comcast Corp, known for its decisive decision-making.

Leno, 62, and his longtime rival David Letterman, 65, are approaching the end of their long late-night reigns. Fallon, 38 and with his own late-night show getting critical acclaim, represents the next generation. So does Jimmy Kimmel, 45, at ABC, and that network made the strategic chess move in January to give him the same time slot as Leno and Letterman. Leno’s contract expires next year and so does Letterman’s, so some corporate fear might be involved: Does NBC risk losing Fallon to another network that can offer an earlier time slot than the 12:35 a.m. one he currently occupies? There’s also some concern that

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Kimmel will establish himself as the 11:35 pm favorite of a younger audience before Fallon can establish himself.

While all the corporate thinking is going on, Leno has continued to stay in the ratings lead.

That’s no small feat at NBC, which has seen its prime-time lineup collapse to historic ratings lows this winter. Leno, “Saturday Night Live”, and Brian Williams’ “Nightly News” are the only reliable ratings leaders left at the network. Leno has held strong against the ratings challenge posed by Kimmel. So far this year, the “Tonight” show is averaging 3.42 million viewers, Letterman has 3.03 million and Kimmel has 2.57 million, according to the Nielsen Co. Leno is also leading among the 18-to-49-year-old age group that NBC considers most important. Leno’s and Letterman’s viewership has gone down from last year; Kimmel’s numbers aren’t comparable because he now has an earlier time slot.

If NBC is looking for an immediate infusion of youthful energy from Fallon’s audience, that may be optimistic. While the average age of Leno’s audience is 58.1, the oldest in late-night, Fallon’s audience is less than five years younger at 53.3. Fallon also hasn’t been gaining in popularity; his average audience has slipped from 1.7 million last year to 1.6 million the year before, according to Nielsen. Younger audiences seem to be elsewhere at that hour, either online or watching cable. The median age of O’Brien’s audience is 39.5 and Chelsea Handler’s is 35.6. Both Jon

Stewart and Stephen Colbert have audiences with median ages of 42.

When O’Brien replaced Leno at “Tonight,” the audience didn’t follow.

The “Tonight” show ratings dipped alarmingly, and NBC had to bring back Leno to stave off a revolt from its affiliates. There’s no guarantee that Fallon will succeed where O’Brien failed. There’s also the specter of Ann Curry, which should be fresh in the minds of NBC’s new corporate ownership. When NBC News replaced Curry as co-host of the “Today” show last summer, viewers reacted angrily - fixing much of their anger at Matt Lauer.

“Today” was running neckand-neck with ABC’s “Good Morning America” in the ratings at the time; now it regularly finishes second. How Leno’s fans would react to the idea of him leaving the “Tonight” show before he wants is anybody’s guess. Leno, with a relentless run of jokes targeting the futility of NBC executives in recent weeks, doesn’t seem particularly happy.— AP

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

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Tomic back in Davis Cup

Irish bid for rugby WCup

Dutch skaters sweep worlds

MELBOURNE: Australia’s bad boy of tennis Bernard Tomic has been reinstated into the Davis Cup team after being booted out last year for a perceived lack of commitment. The lanky 20-year-old will join the team for its Asia/ Oceania group tie in Uzbekistan next month as Australia bid for a place in the World Group playoffs later this year, Fairfax newspapers reported on Saturday. Tomic, rated a prodigious talent and a future top-10 player by many tennis pundits, was kicked out of the team after earning the nick-name ‘Tomic the Tank Engine’ for appearing to ‘tank’ - or not try hard enough - in a series of losing matches in the second half of the year.

Tomic, who has also had a number of brushes with Australian police for speeding in his sportscar near his Gold Coast home, was suspended for the team’s win over Taiwan last month and raised the tension with Rafter by saying he would subsequently rule himself out of their following tie. The pair had mended fences, however, and world number 45 Tomic said he would join the team for a training camp in Munich following the Miami Masters, where he advanced to the second round on Thursday with a win over France’s Marc Gicquel. — Reuters

DUBLIN: Irish rugby’s governing body won the backing of their Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) peers yesterday to use their stadiums, including the 82,300-capacity Croke Park, in a potential bid for the 2023 Rugby World Cup. Buoyed by New Zealand’s hosting in 2011, a country which has a smaller population than the island of Ireland, the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) is considering making a formal bid for the 2023 tournament but needed the support of the GAA to do so.

Alongside Croke Park, there are another 10 Gaelic grounds as big or bigger than the second-largest rugby stadium in the country, Munster’s Thomond Park, although many would need significant renovation to stage an international tournament.

The GAA, governing body for Ireland’s unique sports hurling and Gaelic football, had to ask its members to allow the stadiums to be opened up to other sports which it had previously done eight years ago. In 2005 the GAA changed its rules to permit rugby and soccer to be played at Croke Park while the old Lansdowne Road was being upgraded.

The vote was a landmark decision as Croke Park, the national stadium for Gaelic football and hurling, was the venue for the original “Bloody Sunday” in 1920 when British troops killed 14 people during Ireland’s War of Independence. —Reuters

SOCHI: Jorrit Bergsma led a Dutch sweep of the podium yesterday in the men’s 10,000-meter race at the speedskating world championships, and Olga Fatkulina won the women’s 1,000 to capture Russia’s second gold in three days.

Bergsma clocked 12 minutes, 57.69 seconds to edge out Sven Kramer by 2.02 seconds and claim his first major gold. Bob de Jong, a five-time world champion, timed 13:00.26 to finish third. Bergsma skated 17 laps under 31 seconds and held a 5.21-second advantage at the 7,200meter mark. Fatkulina clocked 1 minute, 15.44 seconds at Adler Arena, the venue for the Sochi Olympics, to claim her first major victory.

Two-time Olympic champion Ireen Wust was 0.27 seconds behind for second and her third medal in as many days. The Dutch skater dominated the women’s 3,000 and 1,500 races. American Brittany Bowe edged out Olympic 1,000 champion Christine Nesbitt by 0.15 seconds for third place and her first major podium finish.

The 23-year-old Fatkulina had the fastest times of 17.6 and 45.25 seconds at 200 and 600-meter marks respectively. “I still do not believe in it (victory),” Fatkulina said. — AP

NBA results/standings NY Knicks 99, Toronto 94; Oklahoma City 97, Orlando 89; Indiana 102, Milwaukee 78; Portland 104, Atlanta 93; Miami 103, Detroit 89; New Orleans 90, Memphis 83; Houston 116, Cleveland 78; Dallas 104, Boston 94; San Antonio 104, Utah 97 (OT); Minnesota 117, Phoenix 86; Washington 103, LA Lakers 100.

Eastern Conference Western Conference Atlantic Division Northwest Division W L PCT GB Oklahoma City 51 19 .729 NY Knicks 41 26 .612 Denver 48 22 .686 3 Brooklyn 40 28 .588 1.5 Utah 34 35 .493 16.5 Boston 36 32 .529 5.5 Portland 33 36 .478 17.5 Philadelphia 26 42 .382 15.5 Minnesota 24 43 .358 25.5 Toronto 26 43 .377 16 Pacific Division Central Division LA Clippers 47 22 .681 Indiana 43 26 .623 Golden State 39 31 .557 8.5 Chicago 36 31 .537 6 LA Lakers 36 34 .514 11.5 Milwaukee 34 34 .500 8.5 Sacramento 25 44 .362 22 Detroit 23 47 .329 20.5 Phoenix 23 47 .329 24.5 Cleveland 22 47 .319 21 Southwest Division Southeast Division San Antonio 53 16 .768 Miami 54 14 .794 Memphis 46 22 .676 6.5 Atlanta 38 31 .551 16.5 Houston 38 31 .551 15 Washington 25 43 .368 29 Dallas 33 36 .478 20 Orlando 18 52 .257 37 New Orleans 24 46 .343 29.5 Charlotte 16 52 .235 38

Florida Gulf Coast steals the day in Philadelphia PHILADELPHIA: Well over an hour after the biggest win in their school’s short histor y, three Florida Gulf Coast players walked through a section of fans in the Wells Fargo Center and they all got plenty of high-fives as the cheering got louder.

And it wasn’t even an area filled with their fans. The Eagles blasted onto college basketball’s radar and onto the list of the biggest bracket busters with a 78-68 victory over second-seeded Georgetown on Friday night in the second round of the South Regional.

It wasn’t that it was a 15 seed beating a 2 - that had happened six times before in NCAA tournament history. It was that a school which joined Division I only six years ago - and opened its doors in 1997 - beat one of the sport’s higher-profile programs and did it convincingly.

“It’s very exciting to be in the position that we’re in right now,” said Sherwood Brown, who led the Eagles with 24 points.

“We worked really, really hard to be where we’re at. No one has given us anything. It just means that much more that we actually had to go out there and earn it and take what we felt was ours.” The Eagles (25-10) move on to a third-round matchup against seventh-seeded San Diego State, which beat Oklahoma 70-55 on Friday.

In the Midwest Regional games played in Philadelphia on Friday, second-seeded Duke beat Albany 73-61, seventh-seeded Creighton defeated Cincinnati 67-63 and No. 8 seed San Diego State beat Oklahoma 70-55.

Jamaal Franklin scored 21 points and James Rahon had 17 for SDSU (23-10), which earned its third NCAA tournament victory. Romero Osby scored 22 points for the Sooners (20-12).

Seth Curry scored 26 points and Mason Plumlee had 23 for the Blue Devils (28-5), who shot 58.7 percent (27 of 46), just off their season-beat 60.8 percent against Florida State. Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski extended his all-time lead with his 80th career victory in the tournament that he has won four times. Jacob Iati had 15 points for Albany (24-11).

Doug McDermott had 27 points and 11 rebounds and Gregory Echenique scored 13 points for the Bluejays (28-7), who won their NCAA tournament opener for the second straight year.

Sean Kilpatrick had 19 points for the Bearcats (22-12). FGCU coach Andy Enfield became an instant hero, posing after the game for as many pictures with fans as his wife, Amanda Marcum, used to in her career as a super model.

Not bad for a state university built on donated land in Fort Myers, not far from Naples. The school’s first student was admitted just 16 years ago and even joined the ribbon-cutting ceremony on the opening day of class.

“We have a beautiful arena, we have an unbelievable campus and the excitement from our surrounding community has just been terrific,” Enfield said. “We’re trying to get younger people involved because if you’ve ever been to Naples you have a lot of retirees. They’re our season ticket base.”

Not for much longer.

The Eagles will be the hottest thing in this tournament until at least today. “We’re going to come out Sunday and compete,” Enfield said. “And if we play like we did tonight, we’ll win the game.”

The Eagles used a 21-2 second-half run to pull away from the Hoyas and then held on in the final minute by making six of 10 free throws in the final minute. “It’s an unbelievable feeling. We played a very tough team in Georgetown. They have great players. They’re a historic school,” forward Chase Fieler said. “So being a newer school it’s very exciting for us to be able to win a game like that and for the NCAA history. That’s exciting and impressive to be a part of that.”

Bernard Thompson had 23 points for Florida Gulf Coast, the champions of the Atlantic Sun Conference. “We decided we can play with anybody and we did,” said FGCU point guard Brett Comer, who finished with 12 points, 10 assists and just two turnovers.

Comer was part of a play late in the game that almost brought down the house, throwing an alley-oop pass from the corner that Fieler grabbed and threw down with a one-handed dunk.

“Nothing special. It’s something me and him have done this year,” Comer said. “We knew what was going to happen there.

Time and place didn’t matter. I knew he’d catch it. You saw the result. The whole place went nuts and we really got the momentum from there.” — AP

PHILADELPHIA: Chase Fieler No. 20 of the Florida Gulf Coast Eagles dunks in the second half against Mikael Hopkins No. 3 of the Georgetown Hoyas during the second round of the 2013 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament at Wells Fargo Center. —AFP

Heat stop Pistons NEW YORK: LeBron James had 29 points, eight rebounds and eight assists as the Miami Heat defeated the Detroit Pistons 103-89 Friday night, extending their win streak to 25 games, the second-longest run in NBA history. Miami is closing in on the 1971-72 Los Angeles Lakers’ NBA record win streak of 33.

The Pistons, meanwhile, have lost 10 games in a row, the longest active skid in the league.

Detroit was led by center Greg Monroe, who had 23 points and 16 rebounds. Detroit led by as many as 11 points in the second quarter, but that was nothing to a Heat team that this week rallied from 17 down to beat Boston and from 27 down to subdue Cleveland.

Knicks 99, Raptors 94 The New York Knicks clinched a playoff spot for the third year in a row as they survived a late push from the Toronto Raptors to pick up a 9994 victory. Carmelo Anthony led all scorers with 36 points while Kenyon Martin had 19 points and 11 rebounds. Alan Anderson had 33 points for the Raptors, including 20 in the second quarter alone.

Raptors star forward Rudy Gay came out of the game and immediately went to the dressing room with 7:04 left in the second quarter with a back problem and didn’t return.

Thunder 97, Magic 89 Kevin Durant had 25 points, including 11 in the final six minutes, to lead the Oklahoma City Thunder to a 97-89 victory over the Orlando Magic. The Thunder (51-19) snapped a twogame losing streak while the Magic (18-52) lost their sixth consecutive game.

Durant came to the rescue after a second-half Magic rally that tied the game at 86-86. He added eight rebounds. Russell Westbrook had 19 points and nine assists. Serge Ibaka had 14 points and 13 rebounds.

Magic rookie Maurice Harkless scored a career-high 25 points, including 18 in the second half to lead the Magic comeback. Tobias Harris had 10 points and a game-high 15 rebounds.

Trail Blazers 104, Hawks 93 The Portland Trail Blazers, fighting for their playoff lives, rode the three-point shot late to beat the Atlanta Hawks 104-93. Wesley Matthews led the Blazers with 28 points, including 10 points in the second quarter while cashing in on 5-of-8 3-pointers.

The Blazers (33-36), coming off a big win over the Chicago Bulls Thursday night, jumped out to a quick lead, scoring their first eight points in the paint - four from LaMarcus Aldridge and four from J.J. Hickson.

Pacers 102, Bucks 78 Tyler Hansbrough scored 22 points and grabbed 12 rebounds in the Indiana Pacers’ 10278 victory over the Milwaukee Bucks. The Pacers have won three in a row after dropping four of their previous six games. Paul George added 20 points, eight rebounds and six assists for the Pacers. Monta Ellis scored a team-high 22 points for Milwaukee.

Rockets 116, Cavaliers 78 Rockets center Omer Asik provided the oomph Houston needed to control the interior throughout the Rockets’ 116-78 victory over the Cleveland Cavaliers. Asik recorded his 29th double-double, pairing 13 points with 11 rebounds in just 23 minutes as the Rockets (38-31) dominated the Cavaliers (22-47) on the glass.

Houston posted a plus-22 rebound margin behind Asik, who offset Cavaliers young big men Tyler Zeller and Tristan Thompson. Zeller and Thompson, instrumental in the Cavaliers’ run to a substantial lead against the Miami Heat on

LOS ANGELES: Washington Wizards center Nene (right) of Brazil, reaches for a rebound along with Los Angeles Lakers center Dwight Howard during the second half of their NBA basketball game. —AP Wednesday night, combined for only 10 points and 13 rebounds against the Rockets.

Hornets 90, Grizzlies 83 Robin Lopez scored 23 points, including a critical rebound follow with 1:11 left, and rookie Anthony Davis had 18 points and grabbed 15 rebounds to lead the New Orleans Hornets to a 90-83 victory over the Memphis Grizzlies.

The Hornets (24-46) nearly blew a 16-point fourth-quarter lead but held on for the win.

Leading 76-60 with 9:18 left, the Hornets allowed the Grizzlies to go on a 21-7 run to cut the deficit to 83-81 with 2:37 remaining.

But Greivis Vasquez, who had 12 points and nine assists, canned a 3-pointer from the left wing, and Lopez came out of a scrum under the basket to hit a follow-up shot with 71 seconds left to put the Hornets back up, 88-81.

Mavericks 104, Celtics 94 The Boston Celtics still haven’t recovered from their draining home defeat against the Miami Heat earlier this week and dropped their

second consecutive road game, 104-94 to the Dallas Mavericks.

The Mavs never trailed as they bounced back from a double-digit home loss two nights earlier to the Brooklyn Nets. Dallas built a 30-19 lead in the first quarter against the sluggish Celtics and led by as many as 14 in the third quarter, buoyed by big games from Dirk Nowitzki (22 points), Brandan Wright (23 points) and Vince Carter (17 points).

Spurs 104, Jazz 97 Tony Parker had 22 points in his return to the San Antonio Spurs, as they defeated the Utah Jazz 104-97 in overtime. Tim Duncan added 19 points and 16 rebounds. Kawhi Leonard also had 21 and Danny Green 15 as San Antonio (53-16) welcomed back their All Star point guard.

Parker, who sustained a grade 2 sprain to his left ankle on March 1st in a 130-102 win against Sacramento, was expected to miss the whole month of March but returned earlier than expected. — Reuters

Game’s future tied to Olympics, says Palmer ORLANDO: Already a global sport, golf’s future lies in the growth of the international game and a return to the Olympics, seven-times major winner Arnold Palmer said on Friday.

After 112 years, golf will return to the Olympic program at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Summer Games, making it the sport’s most significant event after the four major championships.

“As the Olympics cast their influence on the world with golf becoming an Olympic sport it is going to have a great affect on the game,” Palmer, 83, told Reuters at Bay Hill where he is hosting this week’s PGA Tour stop. “I would have enjoyed that (playing in an Olympics) had it been part of the program but I am happy that it’s doing what it is doing. “International golf is going to become a bigger factor as time goes on than it is now and I think that we

as a nation and the United States are going to have to take a look at the international aspects of golf,” added Palmer. Just a glance at the Arnold Palmer Invitational leaderboard on Friday underscored how global golf has become with players from 10 different nations represented among the top 20.

Many of those players, including Tiger Woods, Fijian Vijay Singh, Spain’s Sergio Garcia and Japan’s Ryo Ishikawa could be representing their respective countries when golf returns to the Olympics in 2016. But while the Olympics are sure to attract the world’s best golfers, Palmer is not as convinced that the course layout for the Summer Games will be of the same high quality that they have become accustomed to. A renowned course architect himself, Palmer is concerned that delays in construction

could mean the Olympic course will not be of a gold medal standard. “I am still little nervous about the Olympics and how that will transpire in 2016 simply because they are a little behind the gun already and they are going to have to pick up pretty quickly,” said Palmer. “It takes a little time to build a golf course and takes a little more time for it to mature into a championship type golf course.”

Earlier this month American Gil Hanse was selected to design the Olympic course, beating out competition from seven other architects, including well-known ex-players Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player and Greg Norman.

Hanse is known for minimalist designs which rely on the natural environment rather than heavilylandscaped courses and aldo for building courses that are accessible

to both amateur and professional players. The course will be built at Reserva de Marapendi in Barra da Tijuca, about five kilometers from the Athletes’ Village. After the 2016 Summer Games, the layout will be used as a public facility to help promote golf in Brazil. After several false starts, work on the Olympic course is set to begin next month and open in 2015, Rio organizers said on the International Olympic Committee’s website.

“As it marks the return of golf to the Olympic Games after over a century of absence, this course represents the beginning of a new chapter in the history of the sport,” said Rio 2016 President Carlos Arthur Nuzman. “This course will be an excellent facility for the practice and development of golf and will inspire millions of youth across Brazil and the globe.” —Reuters

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

S P ORTS

Haas and Rose share Bay Hill lead as Woods slips ORLANDO: Bill Haas and Justin Rose shared the second-round lead at the Arnold Palmer Invitational on Friday while Tiger Woods’s bid for an eighth Bay Hill triumph took a hit when he bogeyed the final three holes.

Among the first onto the course, Haas set the early target with a bogey-free sixunder 66 that no one could match, sending the American to the top the leaderboard where he was joined much later in the day by the British world number five.

Rose, who held a two-shot overnight lead, missed a three-foot par putt on 18 that would have given him the outright lead, but his bogey gave him a two-under 70 that put him level with Haas at nineunder 135 for the tournament.

Lurking one shot back is American John Huh (69) while compatriots Ken Duke (68), J.J. Henry (67) and Jimmy Walker (69) are three off the pace on 138. “The finish kind of got the better of the whole group,” said Rose, who was partnered with Woods and South African Ernie Els. “The atmosphere seemed to change when it started to rain.

“I kind of lost my focus. Well, not lost my focus, but just kind of second guessed that putt down the hill a little bit on the speed once the rains fell.” As disappointed as Rose was in his finish it was nothing compared to the frustration Woods felt about the sloppy end to his two-under 70.

A steady rain added to a miserable day for Woods, who had been within striking distance of the leaders until a late round meltdown that started when he found the water with his second shot on the par-five 16th.

There was more trouble off the tee at 17 when he sailed his ball over the green then watched his chip roll well past the cup en route to another bogey. Left with a 30-foot putt for par at the 18th, the 14-times major

winner nearly ended his day on a positive note but was left hanging his head in disbelief when his ball stopped two inches from the hole.

“It’s just the way it goes,” shrugged Woods. “Sixteen was unfortunate, 17 I made a bad swing and 18 I made a bad swing. “So all three holes I hit beautiful putts and I thought I made them but they’re not realistic putts. “They’re outside that range, so I need to do a better job like I did most of the day getting in the stiff and making those putts.”

Despite his collapse, Woods is still well within reach of an eighth Bay Hill win, sitting four off the pace with Fijian Vijay Singh (68) and American Mark Wilson (68).

“I was up, at one point, one back and right there,” said Woods, who can reclaim the world number one ranking from Rory McIlroy with a win today. “The good news is we’ve got 36 holes to go ... and certainly four shots can be made up.”

Bay Hill is routinely used as a final tuneup for the Masters and some past champions will no doubt be concerned about the state of their game before heading to Augusta.

Defending Masters champion Bubba Watson (71) is one-over for the tournament, narrowly avoiding the cut that fell at three-over, but three-times winner Phil Mickelson (79), South African Trevor Immelman (72), Argentine Angel Cabrera (77) will all have the weekend off to think about the year’s first major.

“The course set up was just perfect to identify the guys that are playing good and the guys who aren’t because, as difficult as this course is, the greens were receptive,” said Mickelson after a round that included two triple-bogeys. “Obviously, I played terrible, and I deserved to shoot a score like this.” —Reuters

COLUMBUS: Dalton Prout No. 47 of the Columbus Blue Jackets loses his footing while battling for a loose puck with Jarome Iginla No.12 of the Calgary Flames during the third period at Nationwide Arena in Columbus, Ohio. —AFP

Penguins down Islanders CHICAGO: Brandon Sutter’s goal less than two minutes into the third period broke a tie Friday night as the Pittsburgh Penguins recorded their 11th straight win by beating the New York Islanders, 4-2, at Nassau Coliseum.

The Penguins (24-8-0) tied the Blackhawks for the longest winning streak in the NHL this season (Chicago won 11 in a row from Feb. 15-Mar. 6) and moved within six wins of tying the NHL’s all-time longest winning streak, set by the Penguins 20 years ago.

Joe Vitale and Chris Kunitz also scored for the Penguins, who scored an empty netter as time expired to record just their fourth multi-goal win of the streak. The Penguins have outscored the opposition 44-25 during their run.

Mark Streit and Josh Bailey scored for the Islanders (13-15-3), who outshot the Penguins 35-25 but still lost their third in a row and missed a valuable chance to gain on the idle Hurricanes and Rangers in the race for eighth place in the Eastern Conference.

Blue Jackets 5, Flames 1 In the span of 75 seconds, the Blue Jackets turned a tight game with Calgary into one of their most lopsided wins of the season. And Columbus’ improbable point streak continues to grow.

Nick Foligno scored two goals 51 seconds apart, and Artem Anisimov added one only 24 seconds after Foligno’s flurry, giving the Blue Jackets a flash-quick cushion on the way to a 5-1 win in Nationwide Arena.

It was the fastest three goals in franchise history, beating the previous mark (1:46) set on Oct. 7, 2000, the first game in franchise history.

Fourth-liners Jared Boll and Colton Gillies also scored for the Blue Jackets, whose 12-game point streak (8-0-4) is a franchise record.

Capitals 6, Jets 1 The Washington Capitals completed a twogame sweep of the Winnipeg Jets, breathing life into their playoff hopes. Friday night’s 6-1 win at the MTS Centre came on the heels of a suffocating 4-0 victory on Thursday.

With four points in 23 hours, the Capitals increased their total to 29 and have moved to

within three points of the final playoff spot in the Eastern Conference. The Capitals opened the scoring on a one-timer from Brooks Laich at 12:10 of the first period on a nice feed from Mike Ribeiro. They extended the lead less than five minutes later when Ribeiro’s pass to Troy Brouwer was one-timed to the back of the net.

Brouwer has scored in every one of the Capitals’ games with the Jets this season. —Reuters

NHL results/standings Pittsburgh 4, NY Islanders 2; Columbus 5, Calgary 1; Washington 6, Winnipeg 1; Detroit 5, Anaheim 1.

Eastern Conference Atlantic Division W L OTL GF Pittsburgh 24 8 0 114 New Jersey 14 11 6 78 NY Rangers 15 13 2 71 NY Islanders 13 15 3 90 Philadelphia 13 16 1 81 Northeast Division Montreal 20 5 5 97 Boston 20 6 3 84 Ottawa 16 9 6 78 Toronto 16 12 3 94 Buffalo 12 15 4 84 Southeast Division Winnipeg 16 14 2 81 Carolina 15 13 2 85 Washington 14 16 1 89 Tampa Bay 13 16 1 98 Florida 9 16 6 77

GA 83 85 73 105 92

PTS 48 34 32 29 27

75 61 67 90 99

45 43 38 35 28

96 86 88 90 111

34 32 29 27 24

Western Conference Central Division Chicago 24 3 3 102 66 51 Detroit 15 11 5 85 80 35 St. Louis 16 11 2 87 83 34 Columbus 13 12 6 73 80 32 Nashville 12 13 6 75 84 30 Northwest Division Minnesota 17 10 2 77 71 36 Vancouver 15 9 6 83 83 36 Edmonton 11 11 7 72 85 29 Calgary 11 14 4 82 101 26 Colorado 11 14 4 75 92 26 Pacific Division Anaheim 22 4 4 100 76 48 Los Angeles 17 11 2 88 75 36 San Jose 13 10 6 71 77 32 Dallas 14 13 3 78 88 31 Phoenix 13 14 4 80 87 30 Note: Overtime losses (OTL) are worth one point in the standings and are not included in the loss column (L)

Kiradech leads in Malaysia

ORLANDO: Justin Rose of England plays a shot during the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by MasterCard at the Bay Hill Club and Lodge. —AFP

Recari ahead at Kia Classic CARLSBAD: Beatriz Recari shot a bogeyfree 5-under 67 on Friday to take the lead after two rounds at the Kia Classic.

The Spaniard’s two-round total of 8under 136 gave her a one-stroke lead over Paula Creamer and Karrie Webb.

Creamer shot a 68, and Webb had a 70 on the hilly Aviara course designed by Arnold Palmer.

First-round leader Jane Park shot a 69 and was tied at 6 under with Cristie Kerr, I.K. Kim, Inbee Park and Haeji Kang. Stacy Lewis, playing her first tournament as the world’s top-ranked player, carded her second straight 70 and was four strokes off the lead.

On cold mornings, Creamer said she still feels discomfort in her neck and shoulder after a high-speed crash a month ago in Bangkok. She was in the fifth group to tee off on No. 10 Friday morning and did just fine on Aviara’s hills and big greens.

“My shoulder starts to bug me a little bit, but overall, I feel a lot better,” said Creamer, whose best finish this year was third at Singapore the week after the accident. “My neck is not 100 percent, but I’m not hurting myself when I’m out here and it’s not affecting my game 100 percent.” She and her caddie were hurt when the car that was taking them to the airport in a caravan of players after the LPGA Thailand tournament was involved in a chain-reaction crash.

Four weeks later, “I’m a nightmare in the car,” Creamer said. “I’m awful. I have

to drive or I have to be in the back seat where I can’t see. It’s getting better but still, I get a lot of anxiety before I even get into the car. My mom, my dad, they ’ve been really good with me because I’ve been like, ‘Watch out, watch out.’ I have to just sit there and I put my music on and I just close my eyes.”

Creamer capped her round with a birdie putt on the par-4 ninth. Her 68 followed an opening-round 69. “I feel good,” Creamer said. “I’m ready for the weekend. Hopefully I can go out and keep doing what I’m doing and stay in my own world and see what happens today.”

Her last LPGA Tour win was at the US Women’s Open in 2010. Recari was two strokes better than her opening 69. “I had great momentum from yesterday,” the Spaniard said. “I played really well. I felt like I left some putts out there. It was kind of shaky putting on the greens yesterday, so today I started with a good opportunity.”

She had birdie chances on Nos. 2-3 but they both lipped out. She birdied Nos. 5-6, “and that got me a little bit more positive and just kind of keeping that momentum going.”

She then rolled in three straight birdie putts on 9-11. “I just kind of cruised from there. I’m so very happy. I just played really solid.” Michelle Wie shot another 74 and missed the cut for the second straight week and the third time in five tournaments this year. — AP

MLAYSIA: Big-hitting Thai Kiradech Aphibarnrat will take a one-shot clubhouse lead into the final round of the weather-hit Malaysian Open yesterday as world number three Luke Donald missed his first cut on the European Tour.

South Africa’s Charl Schwartzel, who was flown in by helicopter for his third round, was a shot behind after two holes as the $2.75 million cosanctioned Asian Tour event was reduced to 54 holes. The leaders managed just two holes of their third round before play was suspended for the third day in succession at the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club. The 23-year-old Kiradech returned in the morning to card a four-under-par 68 in the second round to go two shots ahead of the chasing pack but his cushion was cut to one after he dropped a shot on the second hole in the

third round. Former Masters winner Schwartzel was about to play his third shot to the par-five third hole when the sirens sounded to indicate an approaching thunderstorm and the suspension of play. Ireland’s triple major winner Padraig Harrington was among seven players tied for the third spot, two shots off the pace.

Donald, who held the world number one ranking for a combined 56 weeks in 2011 and 2012, saw his consistent streak in the Tour end after posting rounds of 74 and 73 for a three-over par total, three over the cut mark.

“I guess all good runs come to an end eventually. Hugely disappointed to miss my first ever cut in a European Tour event,” Donald posted on his Twitter account. The Englishman was hopeful that the missed cut will have no bearing on his

game when he tees up in search of his first major title at the US Masters in under three weeks’ time.

“I’ve got a couple of weeks off to get ready for Augusta and I’ll obviously be very diligent in my preparation,” the 35-year old told the European Tour website (www.europeantour.com).

“I would have loved to go back home in form, but in golf you just never know. “We’ve seen it many times before when people go into tournaments with very little form and win - including Majors. So you just have to keep plugging and hope it’s your turn.” Spain’s Rafael Cabrera-Bello, among six players on eight-under and three off the lead, continued to shine despite the theft of his personal possessions including his passport in Switzerland when he was travelling to the tournament. —Reuters

KUALA LUMPUR: This handout photo taken by the Asian Tour shows Kiradech Aphibarnrat of Thailand hitting a shot during the Maybank Malaysian Open. —AFP

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

S P ORTS

Cheetahs edge Force

SRI LANKA : Sri Lankan cricketer Kumar Sangakkara (center) plays a shot as Bangladesh cricket captain Mushfiqur Rahim (right) looks on during the opening one-day international (ODI) match. —AFP

Sri Lanka defeat Bangladesh HAMBANTOTA: Sri Lanka defeated Bangladesh by eight wickets in the opening one-day international in Hambantota yesterday to gain a 1-0 lead in the threematch series.

Sri Lanka, chasing a revised target of 238 in 41 overs following a power failure, won the day-night match with 32 balls to spare.

Opener Tillakaratne Dilshan top-scored

for Sri Lanka with an unbeaten 113, while Kumar Sangakkara (63) and Kushal Perera (42) were the other main scorers.

Bangladeshi opener Tamim Iqbal earlier made an impressive 112, while seamers Angelo Mathews and Lasith Malinga each took two wickets for Sri Lanka. The second one-dayer will be played in Hambantota tomorrow. —AFP

SCOREBOARD HAMBANTOTA: Complete scoreboard of the first one-day international between Sri Lanka and Bangladesh in Hambantota yesterday: Bangladesh: Tamim Iqbal run out 112 Anamul Haque b T. Perera 13 Mohammad Ashraful c K. Perera b Kulasekara 0 Mushfiqur Rahim lbw b Mathews 3 Mohammad Mahmudullah c Sangakkara b Mathews 29 Nasir Hossain not out 73 Ziaur Rahman b Senanayake 0 Sohag Gazi c Dilshan b Malinga 6 Abul Hasan b Malinga 3 Abdur Razzak not out 6 Extras (b1, lb1, nb1, w11) 14 Total (for eight wickets; 50 overs) 259 Fall of wickets: 1-44 (Anamul), 2-57 (Ashraful), 3-63 (Rahim), 4-129 (Mahmudullah), 5-204 (Tamim), 6-204 (Rahman), 7-211 (Gazi), 8-244 (Abul).

Bowling: Malinga 10-0-51-2 (nb1, w1),

Kulasekara 9-0-67-1 (w6), T. Perera 8-0-451 (w1), Mathews 9-1-36-2, Senanayake 100-46-1 (w3), Dilshan 4-0-12-0.

Sri Lanka (target 238 in 41 overs): K. Perera c Nasir b Gazi 42 T. Dilshan not out 113 K. Sangakkara c Rahman b Rubel 63 D. Chandimal not out 3 Extras (lb13, w4) 17 Total (for two wickets; 35.4 overs) 238 Fall of wickets: 1-106 (K. Perera), 2-234 (Sangakkara) Bowling: Abul 5-0-52-0 (w1), Rubel 5-044-1, Razzak 9-0-49-0 (w2), Gazi 7.4-0-461, Rahman 8-0-26-0, Mahmudullah 1-0-80 (w1) Result: Sri Lanka win by eight wickets (D/L method)

Windies seal Zimbabwe series DOMINICA: Shane Shillingford grabbed another five wicket haul to bowl West Indies to a second successive Test win over Zimbabwe but this time in front of a delirious home town crowd in Dominica on Friday. The tall spinner again wreaked havoc with five wickets for 34 as West Indies won by an innings and 65 runs inside three days with Zimbabwe bowled out for 141 in their second innings, well short of forcing the home side to bat again.

Zimbabwe, beaten by nine wickets in last week’s first Test in Barbados, offered little resistance after being asked to bat at the start of the third day in Roseau still 206 runs behind the West Indies who declared on the overnight total of 381 for eight.

A regular procession of wickets emphasised the gulf in class between the two sides as Zimbabwe had no answer to the turns and bounce of Shillingford in the final match of the series.

They otherwise gave away their wickets cheaply to part time bowlers like Darren Sammy and Marlon Samuels. Zimbabwe were bowled out some 30 minutes before tea, just exceeding the post-lunch defeat

they suffered on the third day of the first test in Bridgetown.

The 30-year-old Shillingford, whose image was plastered all over posters and tshirts at Windsor Park on his home island, took 19 wickets to be named man of the series — easily beating the record West Indian wicket haul for a two-test series set

by Courtney Walsh in New Zealand in 1995.

Shillingford also took five wickets in the first innings. Zimbabwe’s second innings collapse came soon after he entered the fray to deliver a consistent diet of balls that darted around the crease and left the inexperienced batsmen looking bewildered. Only opener Vusi Sibanda stuck it out but surrendered his wicket for 35. “The wicket was a bit slower but the bounce a bit more consistent but we had a plan we kept to and it paid off,” Shillingford said as he also accepted the man of the match award. For Zimbabwe the series was an eye-opening return to the test arena after a 14-month hiatus. But they showed little improvement from the side thrashed by New Zealand last year when they lost a one-off test in Napier by an innings and 301 runs. —Reuters

SCOREBOARD ROSEAU, Dominica: Scoreboard on the third day of the second and final test between the West Indies and Zimbabwe at Windsor Park, Dominica yesterday: Zimbabwe 1st Innings - 175 West Indies 1st Innings - 381 for 8 declared Zimbabwe 2nd Innings V. Sibanda lbw Sammy H. Masakadza c Ramdin b Best B. Taylor c Powell b Shillingford C. Ervine c Gayle b Shillingford S. Williams c Ch’paul b Shillingford M. Waller c Sammy b Samuels T. Mawoyo c Sammy b Shillingford G. Cremer c Samuels b Shillingford P. Utseya not out K. Jarvis c Sammy b Samuels

35 17 7 8 6 20 0 20 10 1

T. Chatara c Gabriel b Samuels 0 Extras (b8, lb9) 17 Total (all out; 42.2 overs) 141 Fall of wickets 1-37 (Masakadza), 2-64 (Taylor), 3-64 (Sibanda), 4-73 (Williams), 5-92 (Ervine), 6-96 (Mawoyo), 7-114 (Waller), 8-138 (Cremer), 9-141 (Jarvis), 10-141 (Chatara) Bowling: Best 7-2-11-1, Roach 3-0-12-0, Gabriel 3-0-19-0, Shillingford 15-4-34-5, Sammy 5-1-13-1 Samuels 9.2-0-35-3.

Result: West Indies won by an innings and 65 runs Series: West Indies series 2-0

SYDNEY: South Africa’s Cheetahs will head back to Bloemfontein with three wins out of four from their Australasian tour after edging the Western Force 19-10 in a scrappy Super Rugby match in Perth yesterday.

Four penalties from flyhalf Riaan Smit and a late breakaway try from winger Willie le Roux proved enough to add a third win to the more impressive road victories over the Otago Highlanders and New South Wales Waratahs.

The Force, who also came into the match on a high after upsetting the Queensland Reds last week, enjoyed the majority of possession but had only Winston Stanley’s converted first-half try and one Jayden Hayward penalty to show for it.

“It’s important when you are not at your best to still win and we were a bit lucky but we’ll take it,” Cheetahs skipper Adrian Strauss said. “We want to win every game but we’ll take the three on the tour and hopefully we can keep up the momentum back home.”

Both sides showed plenty of attacking intent but the frequent errors made the match a poor advertisement for southern hemisphere rugby. The first score of the match came after 25 minutes when Cheetahs flyhalf Smit kicked the first of his two penalties in the half but three minutes later the hosts raised the stakes. The Cheetahs were trying to play the ball out out of their own 22 when the Force won a turnover and quick hands allowed centre Stanley to touch down in the corner for the game’s first try. The Force should have had a second try just before half time after an electric break up the middle from centre Kyle Godwin but Wallabies prop Pek Cowan knocked on in contact close to the line.

The Force held their 7-6 halftime lead until the hour mark when Hayward, a second-half replacement for the injured Sias Ebersohn, slotted his penalty to extend it.

Seven minutes later and it was the Cheetahs’ turn to blow a try-scoring opportunity, number eight Philip van der Walt knocking on as he tried to force the ball over the line.

Smit added his third and fourth penalties in the space of three minutes to put the visitors back in front, however, and, with the 80 minutes all but up, Le Roux was quickest to react to Robert Ebersohn’s hack and raced away to score.

“Obviously a disappointing performance,” said Force skipper Cowan, whose team were making their home debut after playing their first four matches of the season on the road. “We just didn’t deliver tonight, we didn’t capitalise and we didn’t put points on the board.” —Reuters

SYDNEY: Teammates Adriaan Strauss (left) and Frans Viljoen of the Cheetahs of South Africa both go for the ball during their Super Rugby match against the Waratahs at the Sydney Football Stadium. —AP

N Zealand hold advantage after Boult’s double strike AUCKLAND: Trent Boult grabbed two wickets as New Zealand reduced England to 50 for two and seized the advantage at the end of the second day of the deciding third test at Eden Park yesterday.

Boult had England captain Alastair Cook caught behind for four then trapped Jonathan Trott in front for 27 as England slumped to 44 for two and handed the momentum back to the hosts.

Nick Compton was on 12, while Ian Bell was six not out and the visitors will head into the third day 393 runs behind, having dismissed New Zealand for 443 after tea following a feisty knock by Tim Southee.

Pace bowler Southee, who had been criticised for his cavalier approach to batting throughout the series, persisted with his attacking tactic and belted 44 runs in 33 balls to grab the initiative back for his side.

Steven Finn then raced through the tail after Southee was caught by wicketkeeper Matt Prior to finish with six wickets for 125, matching his career best figures against Australia in 2010.

Prior ended the innings with five catches.

“I felt as though I’ve bowled better in this game than I did in the previous two games,” Finn told reporters. “My lengths have been better, I’ve been fuller, making the batsman come forward more often than I have done in the previous games.

“But again that was a little bit of a rhythm thing, and I’ve felt good in this game so far. “I was fortunate to get a couple of wickets today, but as a team we felt as though that we deserved some fortune.” New Zealand, however, negated that opportunity when Cook got a faint edge down the leg side from a Boult delivery and he was caught by wicketkeeper BJ Watling.

Trott and Compton, who had combined for a 210-run partnership in the drawn second test at the Basin Reserve, looked in control as they were barely tested by New Zealand’s pace attack.

The introduction of left-arm spinner Bruce Martin, however, created some pressure at the northern end of the ground and Boult was switched to the southern end and got a ball that pitched on middle to seam back and hit Trott in front.

New Zealand’s hopes of posting a score in excess of 500 in the series-deciding third match were stymied earlier in the day. England’s bowlers had seized the momentum in a miserly first session by capturing three wickets, removing Kane Williamson (91), Ross Taylor (19) and Peter Fulton (136), while allowing just 62 runs in 28 overs.

That slow scoring rate had set up an intriguing middle session with New Zealand captain Brendon McCullum seemingly well set at lunch and ready to launch a bludgeoning attack when he returned.

McCullum, who had scored six half centuries

in his last seven innings against England, quickly advanced to 38 after the break and his eyes lit up when part-time seamer Jonathan Trott was introduced to the attack.

But twice McCullum mistimed shots against the slower pace then he chased a swinging wide delivery and was well caught by wicketkeeper Matt Prior.

The last recognised batsman Dean Brownlie fell shortly after for 36 when he cut a wide James Anderson delivery straight to Compton at back-

ward point before Southee began his counter attack. “We set out to put a strong first innings performance together and from the position we were in at one point we may have been looking at a few more but I think were happy with our total,” Williamson told reporters.

“It was nice to pick up a couple of wickets at the end of the day, and key wickets at that. “If we can get the ball swinging there is a little bit of bounce there and if you hit the wicket you’ll get as much as you can out of it.”—Reuters

AUCKLAND: New Zealand’s wicketkeeper BJ Watling (right) leads the New Zealand slips (left to right) Ross Taylor, Brendon McCullum, Dean Brownlie, Hamish Rutherford and Kane Williamson (bottom) during day two of the international cricket Test match against England. —AFP

SCOREBOARD AUCKLAND: Scoreboard at the close of play on the second day of the third test between New Zealand and England at Eden Park Yesterday: New Zealand first innings (overnight 250-1) P. Fulton c Prior b Finn 136 H. Rutherford c Cook b Finn 37 K. Williamson c Prior b Anderson 91 R. Taylor c&b Panesar 19 D. Brownlie c Compton b Anderson 36 B. McCullum c Prior b Trott 38 BJ Watling c Prior b Finn 21 T. Southee c Prior b Finn 44 B. Martin c Trott b Finn 10 N. Wagner not out 2 T. Boult c Compton b Finn 0 Extras (b-4, lb-4, nb-1) 9 Total (all out, 152.3 overs) 443 Fall of wickets: 1-79 2-260 3-289 4-297 5-365 6373 7-424 8-436 9-443 Bowling: Anderson 30-8-79-2, Broad 30-6-94-0 (nb-1), Finn 37.3-8-125-6, Panesar 47-17-123-1,

Trott 6-3-9-1, Root 2-1-5-0.

England first innings A. Cook c Watling b Boult 4 N. Compton not out 12 J. Trott lbw b Boult 27 I. Bell not out 6 Extras (w-1) 1 Total (for two wickets, 25 overs) 50 Still to bat: Joe Root, Jonny Bairstow, Matt Prior, Stuart Broad, Steven Finn, James Anderson, Monty Panesar.

Fall of wickets: 1-8 2-44 Bowling: Boult 10-4-26-2, Southee 6-4-12-0, Wagner 2-0-6-0 (w-1), Martin 7-4-6-0 Previous results: First test - match drawn Second test - match drawn

KUWAIT: The semi-finals of Kuwait Bank’s soccer league will start tonight, organized by Kuwait Banks Club for bank employees, at Kazama soccer club. Kuwait Finance House, which is in third place with 20 points, will meet Kuwait National Bank which is in fourth place with 19 points. The winner will meet Boubyan Bank which is in second place with 20 points, as the winner will meet Gulf Bank, the leader with 25 points on April, 5, 2013.

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

S P ORTS

Vettel on pole in Malaysia SEPANG: Three-time defending Formula One champion Sebastian Vettel of Red Bull won pole position at the Malaysian Grand Prix yesterday, edging out the Ferraris of Felipe Massa and Fernando Alonso just as the rain-affected qualifying session ended.

It was the second pole in a row and 38th overall for the German, who finished third at the season-opening Australian GP last week after having trouble with his tires.

Vettel took top spot on the grid by almost a second, causing him to scream “Yes!” in celebration when told by his team.

“I’m a bit surprised by the gap. I had a decent lap and was very happy, obviously,” Vettel said. “It was quite tricky because some parts of the track were still wet and others were dry. Overall, a very good session.

“It will be a long race and difficult to know the true pace. Managing the tires will be crucial, and we go from there. We know the pace is there, so hopefully we can get to the checkered flag in the same position.”

Australian GP winner Kimi Raikkonen’s day went from bad to worse after he could only qualify seventh and was later penalized three spots for impeding Force India’s Adrian Sutil. Last year at this race, the Lotus driver was relegated five spots for making an unscheduled gear box change.

Raikonen complained to his team over the radio during the third practice session that he was unhappy with his car’s setup, telling them “I don’t understand how the car can change so much.”

“We weren’t quick enough on the intermediates (tires), so I don’t think we could have found much more time in the wet today,” Raikkonen said. “For sure I wanted more, but it is what it is and I hope we’ll do better on Sunday. It’s obviously disappointing to lose three places on the grid, but we’ll have to see what happens in the race.”

Massa struggled for most of last year but has now qualified ahead of Alonso, his more famous teammate who has twice won the F1 title, for the fourth straight race.

“I think it was a good qualifying for us,” said Massa, who only had two podium finishes in 2012. “We took the right decision to change tires and managed to put a good lap together as well.”

Sunday ’s race is expected to be held in wet and humid conditions, similar to when Alonso won in Malaysia last year after Sergio Perez ran off the track just as he was attempting to pass the Spaniard following a 51-minute delay for rain.

Tire management will also be crucial with teams still struggling to understand how to get the most out of the new Pirellis, which are designed to degrade faster than last year’s version in order to push teams to pit more often.

“For tomorrow we expect some rain around, so we have to be ready for any changes,” Alonso said. “To do an extra lap on the wrong tires can cost you a lot of time than on other circuits. We have to be spot-on in the decisions tomorrow. We need to concentrate.”

Lewis Hamilton extended his promising start since switching to Mercedes from McLaren during the offseason.

After a fifth-place finish in Melbourne, the Briton qualified fourth fastest Saturday despite struggling in practice to twice finish ninth.

“I’m pretty happy with fourth place considering the conditions today,” he said. “It’s the second race on the second row for me and there are lots of positives to take out of the weekend so far. Our long-run pace looked pretty good compared to the other teams, so I’m hoping for dry conditions tomorrow.” McLaren’s early season troubles show no signs of easing, although team principal Martin Whitmarsh said there are signs the new car is improving.

Jenson Button, the 2009 F1 champion, qualified eighth after complaining his car was oversteering, while Perez came 10th. McLaren’s car has yet to perform to expectations, prompting Perez to suggest using last year’s vehicle that won the final two races of the 2012 season.

“I don’t think we can really expect to qualify any better than eighth right now,” Button said. “But having said that, to be just two-tenths off the guy who won last weekend’s Australian Grand Prix can’t be too bad.”

The circuit was hit by afternoon showers during qualifying but the rain stopped as the final session began. The worst of the showers came in the second session, affecting several drivers who were challenging to make the top 10.

Raikkonen’s teammate, Romain Grosjean, got out of his car and walked away with several minutes left in the second session despite needing to overtake Perez to advance to the last part of qualifying.

“We should have easily had both cars in the top 10, but unfortunately the skies opened at just the wrong time for me,” the Frenchman said. “It’s a shame but there’s a long race ahead of us tomorrow, and we now have extra sets of fresh dry tires in our pocket so hopefully we can use them well.” Force India driver Paul di Resta also looked set to reach the final session until he spun out on the wet track. — AP

SEPANG: Red Bull driver Sebastian Vettel of Germany takes part in the qualifying session of the Formula One Malaysian Grand Prix. —AFP

Can Brittney Griner save the WNBA? NEW YORK: The hours spent pouring over the brackets were probably a waste because no one knows just how good Gonzaga is, or whether Kansas really does have its act together. That’s the beauty of the NCAA men’s tournament, where this year there are more questions than ever about which schools are pretenders and which are contenders.

Even the wise guys in Vegas don’t really seem to know, with seven teams - including Kansas and Gonzaga all listed at 12-1 or better to win the national title.

There’s no such debate on the women’s side. Brittney Griner and her Baylor teammates are pretty much locks to be cutting down the nets in New Orleans on a second straight national title.

Critics will say that’s part of what is wrong with women’s basketball on the college level. Schools like Tennessee, Connecticut and now Baylor can reign for years if they manage to land the right player.

Basketball purists who enjoy the women’s game - and, yes, they’re out there - will argue that’s just fine.

They’ve had the privilege for the last four years of watching the most dominant player in college, the first woman, perhaps, who can sell tickets just by showing up.

You’ve seen her on the highlight shows, where she gets an uncommon amount of attention for the simple reason that she can dunk.

That separates her from almost every female player before her, but it sells the 6-foot-8 Griner short. Just ask one of her admirers.

“It’s not like she’s just catching and laying it or dunking every time,” LeBron James said. “She’s shooting turnaround jumpers. She’s dropstepping over her left shoulder, right shoulder, shooting jumpers. She’s got a fade away jumper. And she’s dunking the ball too. She’s great.”

That’s what makes a lot of people in the WNBA salivate when they hear Griner’s name. It’s a foregone

conclusion she’ll be the No. 1 pick of the Phoenix Mercury in the draft on April 15. More importantly, she could be the one player who can get non-believers to tune in. And that would be welcome news for a league that, approaching its 17th season, still struggles to win eyeballs.

“Somebody like Brittney we haven’t seen,” said Mercury vice president Ann Meyers Drysdale.

“Certainly she’s going to change the dynamic of the game.” Already the league has changed is rules in anticipation of her arrival. No one came out and said that a new 3-second rule for clogging the lane on defense was instituted for the upcoming season with Griner in mind, but after playing 16 years without it, the timing certainly is suspicious, at best.

The Mercury will surely use the No. 1 pick on Griner, though Drysdale is quick to say the team has not formally said who it is taking. She would join Diana Taurasi, on a Phoenix team that would immediately be a title favorite.

Right now, though, there’s still a little more college work to be done.

Baylor opens defense of its title Sunday night at home against Prairie View, and the competition will get tougher as the tournament goes on. When you’re 72-1 over the last two seasons, though, it doesn’t matter who you play. Especially not when your center can score from anywhere within 15 feet, isn’t afraid to dish out assists to teammates, and has averaged 5.1 blocks a game over her career.

If there’s one knock on Griner it’s that she’s not a great rebounder. But that should come as she adapts to the faster and more physical pro game, both in the WNBA and overseas during the offseason.

“She’s young and going to get better,” Drysdale said. “She will get stronger, her footwork will get better and her shot selection will

change as she understands the game better.” For someone who didn’t play organized ball until ninth grade, Griner has already shown remarkable improvement. On senior night against Kansas State earlier this month she scored a Big 12 record 50 points on 21-28 shooting, had an in-your-face dunk, and pretty much looked like she was a grown woman playing among girls.

Yes, she makes the highlight reels because she can dunk. But she’s so dominant that opponents shoot more 3-pointers against Baylor than ever before for fear of tangling in the paint, where Baylor averages 44.3 points compared to just 18.6 for its opponents.

Ask her about her big games, though, and Griner remembers the ones that weren’t so good. With only four losses in the last three years including one this year to Stanford they stick out.

“The games where you lose, that sits on you, you always remember that - 15 years from now I’ll be able to tell you about the (Texas) A&M loss, the Stanford loss, the Connecticut loss,” Griner said. “I’ll be able to tell you about those, about what I did wrong. You ask me about a 40-point game, and I’m like, huh?

You have to remind me.”

Others simply remember the dunks. She’s had 14 of them in her career and, if she isn’t the greatest women collegiate player ever, she’s certainly the greatest dunker and inside presence ever.

That will sell some tickets in the WNBA, a league desperate to get people in seats. Last year the WNBA had its lowest average regular-season attendance, 7,457 fans a game, since its inception in 1997.

As Drysdale is quick to point out, though, it took decades for the NBA to really catch on. She and others believe the market is still there to grow, in Phoenix and elsewhere.

With Griner playing the starring role, it could be a slam dunk. — AP

Picture of the day

Daniel Bodin performs a 67 meters jump with his snow mobile in the ski jump arena of Ornskoldsvik, Sweden, www.redbullcontentpool.com

Stevenson stops Boone MONTREAL: Adonis Stevenson avenged his only professional loss by knocking out Darnell Boone with a pair of lefts in the sixth round Friday at the Bell Centre. Stevenson (20-1), from nearby Longueuil, lost to Boone (20-20-3) on a second-round TKO in 2010.

The left-hander forced Boone to take a knee with a right shot to the body early in the sixth, then stunned him coming out of a corner with a left uppercut and followed with a straight left that sent the American to the canvas.

In the co-feature, Eleider Alvarez (12-0) unified two minor belts with a third-round knockout of Nicholson Poulard (19-3) in a match of world-ranked Montreal light heavyweights. Alvarez added Poulard’s NABA title to his own NABO belt.

Meanwhile, Olympic boxers will fight without head guards in a pro-style scoring system starting this year after several significant rule changes by the sport’s international governing body.

The International Boxing Association (AIBA) unveiled several rule amendments this week, but the two biggest changes will move the amateur sport much closer to the professional version. The rejection of headgear and the introduction of 10-point scoring could make the sport once known as amateur boxing more appealing to young boxers seeking professional careers.

Male boxers at the world championships in October and the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016 won’t wear the protective head guards adopted before the 1984 Los Angeles Games. Although the move might seem counterintuitive in preventing brain injuries, the chairman of AIBA’s medical commission, Charles Butler, cites numerous medical studies that suggest fighting without head guards will decrease concussions.

“There’s no evidence protective gear shows a reduction in incidence of concussion,” Butler said. “In 1982, when the American Medical Association moved to ban boxing, everybody panicked and put headgear on the boxers, but nobody ever looked to see what the headgear did.”

AIBA’s executive committee unanimously voted to add head guards to amateur competition in April 1984, and they stayed in place through eight straight Olympics.

But the headgear has long been criticized for diffusing the impact of a blow and allowing fighters to continue sustaining more head shots for a longer stretch of time. The gear also offers no protection to the chin, where many knockout blows land in boxing, while the bulky sides of the device impede fighters’ peripheral vision, preventing them from seeing every head blow.

The head guard ban will only affect male boxers at the top levels of AIBA competition, meaning women’s boxers and younger fighters will still wear the gear.

The amateur sport also is moving to a pro-style, 10point scoring system, discarding the latest version of the much-criticized computer punch-count systems implemented after the Seoul Olympics in 1988. Each fight will be

scored by five ringside judges with the traditional 10-9 or 10-8 rounds familiar to fans of professional boxing.

The sport moved to a punch-counting system after the infamously bizarre results in Seoul, including Roy Jones Jr.’s inexplicable loss. But the computer system has been highly subjective and arcane, often turning the sport into a sparring session that emphasizes punch volume over technique and ring generalship. North American boxers have been particularly critical of the computerized scoring, with many top U.S. and Mexican prospects declining even to participate in amateur boxing.

The traditional scoring system also should indirectly improve fighters’ safety, according to Butler. Since body

Adonis Stevenson shots and combinations notoriously scored few points in the computerized punch-count system, fighters have long placed a premium on a high volume of head shots, since an opponent’s neck snapping back is the surest way to make sure a punch is seen and counted.

“Boxing isn’t bean-counting,” Butler said. “The thing that makes (the computer system) dangerous is if you’re a boxer, you know you’re not going to get a point for a body shot, so what are you going to do except punch the head?

There were no points given for combinations. You might get one point. If a kid was a counterpuncher, you’d lose.”

AIBA has been moving its sport to a professional model for the past several years under the direction of President Wu Ching-Kuo, even opening two professional boxing ventures: the team-based World Series of Boxing and the individual APB Boxing, slated to debut this fall. AIBA even dropped the word “amateur” from its name and competitions to emphasize its desire to control boxing at every level. “It is AIBA’s duty to bring the sport of boxing to the pinnacle of the Olympic Movement, and I am convinced that these changes will critically contribute to the development of our beloved sport,” Wu said. “Decisions have not been made lightly, and we will now put a lot of efforts in educating our national member federations, our officials, boxers and coaches, as well as boxing fans around the world.” —AP

Djokovic wins in Miami, while Azarenka pulls out MIAMI: Novak Djokovic and Maria Sharapova both survived unscathed but the Sony Open lost two other grand slam champions on Friday when Victoria Azarenka and Juan Martin Del Potro exited the Miami tournament.

Azarenka withdrew from her opening match because of an ankle injury she suffered playing at Indian Wells last week. “I’m very disappointed ... But I have to take my health into consideration,” said Azarenka, who won the Australian Open in January but has struggled with injuries since.

“I tried everything I could but couldn’t make it. It’s an unfortunate part of our job.” Azarenka’s withdrawal

proved an unexpected bonus for American teenager Lauren Davis, who failed to qualify for the tournament.

She was given a ‘lucky loser’ pass into the event when Azarenka pulled out then saved three match points in defeating Madison Keys 6-1 5-7 7-6.

“I just hoped and I wished and I prayed that I would get in,” said Davis.

“I was just so happy. I didn’t care if I won or lost. I just was so grateful for the opportunity to play.” Former U.S. Open champion Del Potro last week, suffered a surprise 7-6 6-1 loss to Germany’s Tobias Kamke. The towering Argentine had two set points in the opening set but lost his way just a

week after making the men’s final at Indian Wells.

“He didn’t play obviously his best tennis,” said Kamke. “But still I think I did a good job and pretty satisfied with that.” There were no other major casualties amongst the top seeds, with Djokovic and Sharapova both winning in straight sets. Sharapova romped to a 6-2 6-0 win over Canada’s Eugenie Bouchard while Djokovic, playing in the late night match, cruised to a 6-1 6-0 victory over Lukas Rosol. Only Spain’s David Ferrer, the men’s third seed, had an easier time. He won in a walkover when Dmitry Tursunov pulled out. —Reuters

KEY BISCAYNE: Novak Djokovic of Serbia plays a backhand to Lukas Rosol of Czech Republic during their second round match at the Sony Open at Crandon Park Tennis Center. —AFP

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

S P ORT S

World champions held by Finland

MOLDOVA: Montenegro’s national football team players Stefan Savic (left) and Elsad Zveroti (center) are in action against Moldova’s national football team during their 2014 World Cup qualifying football match. —AFP

European results/standings Group A Scotland 1, Wales 2; Macedonia 0, Belgium 2; Croatia 2, Serbia 0.

Standings P W D L F A Pts Belgium 5 4 1 0 10 1 13 Croatia 5 4 1 0 8 2 13 Wales 5 2 0 3 5 12 6 Serbia 5 1 1 3 6 7 4 Macedonia 5 1 1 3 3 6 4 Scotland 5 0 2 3 3 7 2 Group B Bulgaria 6, Malta 0; Czech Republic 0, Denmark 3.

Italy 4 3 1 0 10 4 10 Bulgaria 5 2 3 0 10 3 9 Denmark 4 1 2 1 5 4 5 Czech 4 1 2 1 3 4 5 Armenia 3 1 0 2 2 4 3 Malta 4 0 0 4 1 12 0 Group C Sweden 0, Ireland 0; Austria 6, Faroe Islands 0; Kazakhstan 0, Germany 3.

Germany 5 4 1 0 18 6 13 Sweden 4 2 2 0 8 5 8 Austria 4 2 1 1 11 2 7 Ireland 4 2 1 1 7 8 7 Kazakhstan 5 0 1 4 1 11 1 Faroe Islands 4 0 0 4 2 15 0 Group D Hungary 2, Romania 2; Andorra 0, Turkey 2; Netherlands 3, Estonia 0.

Netherlands 5 5 0 0 16 2 15 Hungary 5 3 1 1 12 7 10 Romania 5 3 1 1 10 6 10 Turkey 5 2 0 3 6 6 6 Estonia 5 1 0 4 1 9 3 Andorra 5 0 0 5 0 15 0 Group E Slovenia 1, Iceland 2; Norway 0, Albania 1.

Switzerland 4 3 1 0 7 1 10 Albania 5 3 0 2 6 5 9

Iceland Norway Cyprus Slovenia

5 5 4 5

3 2 1 1

0 1 0 0

2 2 3 4

6 6 4 4

5 6 8 8

9 7 3 3

Group F Luxembourg 0, Azerbaijan 0; Israel 3, Portugal 3.

Postponed Northern Ireland v Russia Russia 4 4 0 Israel 5 2 2 Portugal 5 2 2 N Ireland 4 0 3 Azerbaijan 5 0 3 Luxembourg 5 0 2

0 1 1 1 2 3

8 13 9 3 2 2

0 8 6 5 6 12

12 8 8 3 3 2

Group G Bosnia 3, Greece 1; Liechtenstein 1, Latvia 1; Slovakia 1, Lithuania 1.

Bosnia Greece Slovakia Lithuania Latvia Liechtenstein

5 5 5 5 5 5

4 3 2 1 1 0

1 1 2 2 1 1

0 1 1 2 3 4

18 6 6 4 6 2

3 4 4 7 9 15

13 10 8 5 4 1

Group H Poland 1, Ukraine 3; Moldova 0, Montenegro 1; San Marino 0, England 8.

Montenegro 5 4 1 0 13 2 13 England 5 3 2 0 20 2 11 Ukraine 4 1 2 1 4 3 5 Poland 4 1 2 1 6 6 5 Moldova 5 1 1 3 2 8 4 San Marino 5 0 0 5 0 24 0 Group I Spain 1, Finland 1; France 3, Georgia 1.

France 4 3 1 0 8 3 Spain 4 2 2 0 7 2 Georgia 5 1 1 3 3 7 Belarus 4 1 0 3 3 8 Finland 3 0 2 1 2 3

LONDON: World champions Spain were held by lowly Finland but there were wins for England, Germany, France and Netherlands as Europe’s top teams returned to the task of qualifying for next year’s World Cup finals on Friday.

The first of this month’s two rounds of qualifiers-with another 20-plus matches scheduled for Tuesday - went according to plan for the big guns apart from Spain who lost top spot in Group I to France after Finland forced a 1-1 draw in Gijon.

England scored their biggest victory for 26 years when they triumphed 8-0 in San Marino, Germany won 3-0 in Kazakhstan, France beat Georgia 3-1 in Paris and Netherlands scored three second-half goals to beat Estonia 3-0 in Amsterdam.

The rapidly maturing Belgium team took another step towards next year’s finals in Brazil when they won 2-0 - albeit with a ner v y per formance in Macedonia - to stay top of Group A, level on points with Croatia who won a passionately intense derby against bitter Balk an rivals Serbia 2-0 in Zagreb.

There was also an important win for another former part of the old Yugoslavia with Bosnia beating Greece 3-1 in Zenica to move three points ahead of the Greeks at the top of Group G. Other teams with their eyes on Rio who stumbled included Por tugal, who trailed 3-1 in Israel before recovering for a 3-3 draw and Sweden, who lost ground on Group C leaders Germany when they were held to a 0-0 draw by Ireland in Stockholm.

The biggest surprise, though, came in Gijon where Teemu Pukki scored 11 minutes from time to give Finland their second point in the group and help knock Spain off top spot.

Pukki fired past Victor Valdes on a rare counter-attack after they had withstood waves of pressure from the hosts. Spain’s Sergio Ramos, winning his 100th cap, broke the deadlock with a header from a corner just after half time but Vicente del Bosque’s side struggled to make their dominance count.

The draw leaves world and European champions Spain under pressure to get a victory next Tuesday when they visit their closest rivals France, who were too strong for Georgia in

SAN MARINO: England’s Wayne Rooney (center) celebrates after scoring with England’s Leighton Baines (right) and England’s Frank Lampard during the World Cup 2014 qualifying football match against San Marino. —AFP

Paris. Olivier Giroud, Mathieu Valbuena and Franck R iber y scored for France who lead the group on 10 points, two more than Spain.

England were the highest scorers on the night, showing San Marino no mercy in a demolition in Serravalle for their biggest win since a victory by the same score over Turkey in 1987.

An own goal by San Marino’s Alessandro Della Valle after 12 minutes started the rout with Alex Oxlade - Chamberlain, Jermain Defoe (2), Ashley Young, Frank Lampard, Wayne Rooney and Daniel Sturridge all finding the net.

The hosts were spared a double-figure defeat but did nothing to counter the argument they should enter a pre-qualifying tournament - managing only one half-hear ted attempt at goal.

England face a sterner test on Tuesday against Group H pacesetters Montenegro, who still lead Roy Hodgson’s side by two points after beating Moldova 10 away despite having Milorad Pekovic sent off just past the hour mark. Mirko Vucinic scored

12 minutes from time to keep Montenegro on course for a first appearance at the World Cup finals.

In Zagreb, strikers Ivica Olic and Mario Mandzukic scored as Croatia beat Serbia to stay level with group leaders Belgium. The match was played under tight security amid fears of crowd trouble but apart from sporadic abuse from home supporters towards Serbia’s players, it was incident-free after both federations agreed not to take away fans to either fixture.

The sides, meeting for the first time as independent countries after the violent break-up of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, meet each other again in Belgrade on Sept. 6.

Germany, playing without a recognised striker for the first time in a competitive match under coach Joachim Loew, eased past lowly Group C rivals Kazakhstan in Astana.

Two goals in three minutes midway through the first half from midfielders Bastian Schweinsteiger and Mario Goetze, put the Germans in control before Thomas Mueller made it 3-0 16 minutes from

time. Germany have 13 points from five games ahead of Sweden on eight from four following their goalless draw with Ireland.

Netherlands maintained one of only two 100 percent records left in the European qualifiers with a 3-0 Group D win over Estonia as Rafael van der Vaart, Robin van Persie and Ruben Schaken all found the net after the break.

The Dutch have taken a maximum 15 points from their five games and are well clear of Hungar y and Romania who drew 2-2 in a match played behind closed doors in Budapest as punishment for racist chanting by the home side’s fans in a previous game.

Russia, who have the other perfect record after four games, were due to play Nor thern Ireland on Friday but the match was postponed until Saturday because of heavy snowfall in Belfast. The nine group winners in Europe qualify directly for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. The eight best runners up go into a playoff round with the four victors tak ing the remaining spots.—Reuters

10 8 4 3 2

Alba out of French clash MADRID: Spain left-back Jordi Alba has been ruled out of Tuesday’s crucial 2014 World Cup qualifier against France with a right hamstring problem, but Xavi Hernandez is back in training.

The 24-year-old Barcelona star Alba felt the problem nine minutes from time in Spain’s surprise 1-1 home draw with Finland on Friday but had to stay on until the final whistle as coach Vicente Del Bosque had used all his substitutes.

Alba has now returned to Barcelona to undergo further treatment, meaning he will miss the game at the Stade de France, with reports in Catalonia also indicating that the player is likely to miss

the first leg of Barca’s Champions League quarter-final against Paris Saint-Germain at the start of next month.

Meanwhile, playmaker Xavi trained on Saturday after missing the Finland clash with an injured right hamstring. The Spanish federation did however add that the 33-year-old’s fitness will continue to be monitored.

Real Madrid midfielder Xabi Alonso was also back on the training field after sitting out Friday ’s game in Gijon.

France-who beat Georgia 3-1 on Fridaytop the group with a two-point lead over Spain heading into Tuesday ’s match in Paris.—AFP

Hart: No hiding place against Montenegro SERRAVALLE: Goalkeeper Joe Hart said England “must perform” when they face leaders Montenegro in a European zone Group H World Cup qualifier in Podgorica on Tuesday.

England could be either one point clear or five points behind Montenegro depending on the outcome of Tuesday’s match and Hart, reduced to a spectator in Friday’s 8-0 thrashing of minnows San Marino, said: “Tuesday is big, an exciting game for us. We are getting closer to the World Cup finals. “We’ve got to perform.”

England let a two-goal lead slip in a Euro 2012 qualifier against Montenegro in Podgorica 17 months ago, the hosts recovering to a 2-2 draw in a match where visiting striker Wayne Rooney was sent off. “Maybe we could be accused of taking our foot off the pedal as we let a 2-0 advantage slip away last time against them when we needed just a point,” Hart said.

“That is not going to be the case this time. We’ve got a job on our hands in an intimidating arena, but we’ve definitely got the capabilities. “We go there with

the intention of doing well against a good nation.

“Brazil is a long way off, and I’m not going to get carried away thinking about that, but hopefully with a few wins we can start doing that.” Hart said his approach remained the same regardless of the quality of England’s opponents.

“It’s no different to me. I treat all games the same. Just because I might have had little to do on Friday, I’m not going to be asleep on Tuesday. “It’s the same build-up, same hype, same adrenalin, whoever you play against.”

Meanwhile England Midfielder James Milner said he too was looking forward to Tuesday’s challenge. “These are the sort of games you enjoy playing in, with the crowd on your back, and when you are getting a lot of stick,” he explained.

“We will know it well from having been there before. It will be tough. “It is never easy qualifying for a major tournament. We know Montenegro are a good team and they showed that in their qualifying campaign. “But we are thinking positively.”—AFP

FRANCE: French national football team players run during a training session in Clairefontaine-en-Yvelines, near Paris after their victory against Georgia. France will meet Spain in the World Cup 2014 qualifiers. —AFP

French win tainted by Benzema problem FRANCE: France should only be celebrating after a 3-1 win against Georgia in a World Cup qualifier on Friday, combined with Spain’s 1-1 draw against Finland, but Karim Benzema’s scoring draught is a reason for concern.

The Real Madrid striker has not found the net in his last 11 games for Les Bleus and while three of the offensive quartet - Mathieu Valbuena, Olivier Giroud and Franck Ribery - scored goals, Benzema once again proved too clumsy.

He was even booed by the Stade de France crowd, who are not known for their patience and understanding. “Strikers need confidence, and they do not need to be booed by the crowd,” midfielder Blaise Matuidi told reporters.

Benzema has been repeating that he is serene, yet the last of his 15 France goals from 56 caps came in June when he scored the third in a 4-0 friendly win against Estonia in Le Mans. “He

had chances. I would have been worried if he had not had them,” coach Didier Deschamps told reporters after Benzema missed several clear chances against Georgia on a bumpy Stade de France pitch. “He would like to be more decisive.

I’ve left him on the field until the end because he had not played 90 minutes for a long time. But I would have preferred that he scores this goal.”

France, however, are top of Group I with 10 points from four games and lead Spain by two points after the world and European champions, who visit the Stade de France on Tuesday, only managed a draw against Finland in Gijon.

Benzema’s team mates said they are not concerned by the 25-year-old’s failings. “I’m not worried about Karim, we must give him a bit more time,” Ribery told reporters. “He is a great player with a lot of qualities, unfortunately he has not scored (against Georgia) but I hope it will

change on Tuesday.

“I also went through difficult periods, but he works hard.” Benzema has scored 15 goals from 35 appearances in all competitions with Real this season - compared to 31 from 50 games last season. Deschamps paired him with Giroud on Friday in an attempt to pressure the Georgia defence, but also because he felt that Benzema needed a hand. “With Karim, we try to find each other but it’s still perfectible,” Giroud told reporters. Benzema’s place in the starting line up for Tuesday’s clash with Spain is now at risk as Deschamps will probably revert to a more secure formation with a lone striker.

Giroud, who scored the late equaliser six minutes after coming on as a substitute for the Real player in the 1-1 draw when the teams met at the Vicente Calderon in October, is likely to be preferred. —Reuters

Vettel on pole in Malaysia

Heat stop Pistons

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

18

15

N Zealand hold advantage after Boult’s double strike

Page 17

BUENOS AIRES: Argentine forward Lionel Messi struggles with Venezuelan goalkeeper Daniel Hernandez during their FIFA World Cup Brazil 2014 South American qualifying football match. — AFP

Messi magic keeps Argentina in charge Colombia crush Bolivia 5-0 BUENOS AIRES: Lionel Messi scored once and set up two goals as Argentina beat Venezuela 3-0 to remain in control of the South American qualifying race for the 2014 World Cup Friday.

The Argentinian skipper was the architect of two Gonzalo Higuain strikes which came either side of an emphatic Messi penalty on the stroke of half-time at the Monumental Stadium.

The Barcelona superstar was Argentina’s best player throughout, twice forcing Daniel Hernandez into scrambled saves early on before producing the pass which enabled Higuain to break the deadlock on 29 minutes.

Messi then harried Venezuela defender Gabriel Cichero into conceding a penalty, which the diminutive play-maker lashed into the roof of the net for 2-0 in first half stoppage time.

A trademark jinking run and through ball for Higuain gave Argentina their third in the 59th minute as Venezuela kissed goodbye to

any chance of repeating their shock 1-0 win over the Argentinians in 2011.

The victory leaves Alejandro Sabella’s side four points clear of second-placed Colombia at the top of the standings with 23 points after 10 matches. With just six games remaining, only an unthinkable collapse will prevent the “Albicelestes” from taking their place at next year’s finals in Brazil, with a trip to La Paz to face Bolivia on Tuesday their next game.

“Argentina beat Venezuela handsomely,” said Sabella, who took over after Argentina’s disappointing Copa America campaign at home in 2011. “The defence was solid, Higuain is a great goalscorer and Messi, well... there are no words to describe him,” added the 58-yearold.

In other games Friday, Colombia remained on course to end their 16-year World Cup exile after sweeping aside Bolivia 5-0 in Barranquilla.

Goals from Macnelly Torres, Carlos Valdez, Teofilo Gutierrez, Radamel Falcao and Pablo

Armero secured an easy win as Colombia leapfrogged Ecuador into second place in the standings.

Colombia-who are revelling under the guidance of former Argentina coach Jose Pekerman-now look perfectly poised to reach their first World Cup since 1998.

Barranquilla’s Metropolitano Stadium had rocked before kick-off as the home crowd paid an emotional tribute to former national keeper Miguel Calero, who died in December aged 41 after suffering a blood clot.

Colombia took the lead on 20 minutes, when Torres tucked away a cross from Juan Cuadrado, fortunate not to be ruled offside.

Colombia doubled their lead shortly after halftime when Bolivia failed to clear a knock-down from Abel Aguilar, which Valdez prodded home.

Gutierrez then made the game safe on 62 minutes, latching onto a through ball from Torres before steering past Bolivia’s substitute

keeper Sergio Galarza for 3-0. Falcao and Armero completed the rate late on. For Falcao it was a particularly special goal coming just after he learnt he would be a father for the first time.

“It’s very emotional moment, I am delighted about this news, it was someting I was hoping for,” said the 27-year-old Atletico Madrid star. “It transforms my life and I have started to think about the responsibility that comes with being a father.”

Elsewhere, Uruguay’s hopes of a vital victory against bottom side Paraguay were dashed after they conceded a late equaliser in a bruising game which finished 1-1 in Montevideo.

Liverpool striker Luis Suarez looked to have settled a niggly encounter when he volleyed home a Nicolas Lodeiro cross on 82 minutes.

But Paraguay, who had rarely threatened during a stop-start game scarred by some rugged tackling, plucked an equaliser against the run of play four minutes later when substitute Edgar Benitez slotted home. — AFP

Saudis eyeing Asia Cup dominate Indonesians JAKARTA: Star striker Yousep Mansour secured Saudi Arabia’s Asia Cup qualifier against Indonesia yesterday with a strike too powerful for the keeper, leaving the home team with nil on their scorecard.

The teams were neck and neck at 1-1 for more than 30 minutes until half time, but Mansour powerfully planted a goal in the 56th minute to bring the score to 2-1 after a swift cross pass from midfield.

The Saudis dominated the second half of play, the Green Falcons regularly breaking through the sea of red jerseys to the penalty box, forcing keeper Kurnia Meiga to cover more turf. Torrential rain poured throughout the entire match, but the rain did not keep fans away, with the cavernous 80,000seat stadium in the Indonesian capital Jakarta packed.

Fans roared when captain Boaz Solossa scored the match’s first goal in the fifth minute, meeting a lobbed goalkick that stunned the Saudis. That point was equalised in the 14th minute by Yahia Sulaiman, who made a diving header that left Meiga face down in the mud.

“For sure, Indonesia’s goal pushed our team a lot to work harder, and as a result we won 2-1. Both teams played well and showed sportsmanship,” Saudi coach Juan Ramon Lopez Caro told reporters after the match.

“Every match is a final, so all players must be disciplined,” said the former Real Madrid coach through an Indonesian translator. Despite the loss, the score is a respectable one for the home team, which has been dogged by politics in Indonesian football that had left some of its star players on the bench indefinitely.

Those players were welcomed back this week after Indonesia evaded sanctions from football’s world governing body FIFA, finally agreeing to dissolve a rebel league that could have seen the national team barred from competition. JAKARTA: Indonesian player Muhammad Ridwan (5) and Saudi Arabian Fhad The match brings the Saudis’ scorecard to six points, with a Mosaed (19) fight for the ball during their Group C 2015 Asian Cup qualifying match 2-1 victory over China claimed in February. — AFP at Bung Karno stadium. — AFP

Latam results / standings South American 2014 World Cup qualifying results and standings after yesterday’s matches: Argentina 3, Venezuela 0, Buenos Aires; Uruguay 1, Paraguay 1, Montevideo; Peru 1, Chile 0, Lima; Colombia 5, Bolivia 0, Barranquilla; Ecuador bye P W D L F A Pts Argentina 10 7 2 1 23 7 23 Colombia 9 6 1 2 19 6 19 Ecuador 9 5 2 2 12 9 17 Uruguay 10 3 4 3 17 19 13 Venezuela 10 3 3 4 8 12 12 Chile 10 4 0 6 14 19 12 Peru 10 3 2 5 11 15 11 Bolivia 10 2 2 6 12 19 8 Paraguay 10 2 2 6 7 17 8 Note: The top four teams will advance to the 2014 finals in Brazil while the fifth-placed side will face Asia’s fifth-ranked qualifier in a two-legged playoff for a spot in the tournament.

Russia suffer new N Ireland delay BELFAST: Fabio Capello’s Russia saw their World Cup qualifier with Northern Ireland postponed for the second time in two days yesterday as the unseasonal snow plaguing Britain once again made conditions at Belfast’s Winsdor Park unplayable.

The Group F match was originally due to be played Friday but was put back until 1500GMT yesterday as a result of a deluge of snow. FIFA regulations state that in such cases every effort must be made to play the match following day but continued bad weather always made that seem a forlorn hope and Norwegian referee Tom Hagen called the game off again on Saturday morning, with ice on the pitch the official explanation. With Russia heading to London for a friendly against 2014 World Cup hosts Brazil at Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge ground on Monday, it may now be several months before they play this World Cup qualifier.

Windsor Parks lacks facilities associated with more modern and better-appointed grounds such as undersoil heating but Northern Ireland manager Michael O’Neill said the modestlyfinanced Irish Football Association had done all it could in the circumstances caused by “freak weather” conditions.

“We experienced freak weather over a short period of time, from late Thursday and early Friday-freak weather which would have been challenging for any association to get the game on,” he said.

“At the end of the day there are more mod-

ern stadia that could maybe deal with it but it’s the first time in history it has happened (to Northern Ireland), so it’s not something we haven’t managed well, or have mis-managed over time.

“We certainly wanted to play on Friday and we also wanted to play today (Saturday), but I’m not completely sure the Russians were so keen about today.

“Either way, the referee made a quick decision this morning and said that for the safety of the players it was unrealistic to think we could play.” Now Northern Ireland will hope conditions ease to allow their qualifier against Israel at Windsor Park on Tuesday to go ahead as scheduled.

Meanwhile talks will begin on when to rearrange the match against Capello’s side, with Russia understood to favour the June window when they already have a qualifier lined up.

Russia lead Group F with 12 points, four clear of Israel, with Northern Ireland well back in fourth place with three points.

In San Jose, Costa Rica reacted with outrage yesterday following their country’s World Cup qualifying defeat to the United States, angrily claiming the snow-hit match should have been called off.

Amid farcical scenes in Denver on Friday, Costa Rica slumped to a 1-0 defeat to their CONCACAF rivals in a match which saw both sides labour through a blizzard on a pitch blanketed in thick snow. — AFP

Business

Ireland passes latest IMF program review Page 22 Kuwait inflation eases to 2.3% as food prices fall Page 23

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

Smaller US airports ready to do without control tower

Hyundai unveils images of new concept HND-9 Page 25 Page 26

NICOSIA: People buy goods from a vegetable market, in central Nicosia, yesterday. Politicians in Cyprus were racing yesterday to complete an alternative plan raising funds necessary for the country to qualify for an international bailout, with a potential bankruptcy just three days away. — AP

Cyprus sees ‘significant progress’ in talks Eurogroup to meet today for make-or-break talks NICOSIA: Cyprus reported ‘significant progress’ in talks yesterday with the EU and IMF aimed at clinching a 10 billion-euro ($13 billion) bailout to save the euro-zone member from looming bankruptcy. The Cypriot authorities are scrambling to raise 5.8 billion euros before a Monday deadline set by the European Central Bank or it will cut off emergency financial aid to the island.

“Significant progress has been made towards achieving an agreement with the troika,” Finance Minister Michalis Sarris said after initial talks in Nicosia with officials from the EU, ECB and International Monetary Fund.

But “several issues arose that need further working on” in the talks, which centered on a proposal to impose a one-time charge on savings held at the Bank of Cyprus, the island’s biggest lender.

Cyprus is considering imposing a tax of around 25 percent on deposits of more than

100,000 euros held at the Bank of Cyprus, as well as restructuring Laiki Bank (or Popular Bank) into a “good” and “bad” bank. But a Laiki economist told AFP the government was trying to convince the troika such a rate was too high. “They are trying to convince the troika to take a lower ‘haircut’ than 25 percent because parliament might not accept it,” said Yiannis Tirkides, adding the eurogroup might reject anything lower.

EU sources have said if no deal is reached, the 27-nation bloc is ready to eject Cyprus from the euro-zone to prevent contagion of other debt-hit members such as Greece, Spain and Italy. Sarris estimated the legislation would be tabled in parliament later yesterday, but an official cited by CNA state news agency played down the likelihood of that happening.

The talks came after parliament passed a raft of bills late on Friday including to create a solidarity fund, impose capital controls and

restructure an outsized banking sector.

The session of parliament came as restive crowds, mostly bank workers anxious that their employers-and therefore their jobs-not be sacrificed in the deal, demonstrated outside. Some 30 hooded youths burned an EU flag next to the parliament building in front of police barricades.

“The haircut is robbery,” they chanted, referring to the most onerous measure yet to be presented before parliament-the levy on bank deposits that is still on the table.

The streets of Nicosia were deserted yesterday as anxious residents waited to see which way the crisis turns. “People don’t know if they will have money tomorrow or the day after.

We’ll try to live with what we have got now and we’ll see what happens next,” said Yiorgos Andoniou, a jobless 57-year-old.

“We are in this situation because... we were living beyond our means for 25 years and now

the bill has come,” said a woman identifying herself as Catherine. “Eventually we’ll tighten our belts and go back to the practical and hard-working people that we were before.”

The contentious levy on bank deposits was already rejected by parliamentarians as “blackmail” on Tuesday, albeit in a different form. But with the deadline looming and the option of securing funding from elsewhere, including from ally Russia, exhausted, MPs have been forced to revisit it as an option to help raise the 5.8 billion euros.

Prior to yesterday’s meeting, commentators said the government wanted to hold further talks on its new plans for the “haircut” with the troika before putting it to parliament. Acting ruling Disy party leader Averof Neophytou had appealed to MPs to back the measures, stressing all deposits of up to 100,000 euros would be guaranteed. Those with larger balances, however, might have to wait years to get all

US Senate narrowly passes first budget in four years Fight over US debt ceiling looms in summer WASHINGTON: The US Senate yesterday narrowly passed its first federal budget in four years, a move that will usher in a relative lull in Washington’s fiscal wars until an anticipated summer showdown over raising the debt ceiling. The budget plan passed 50-49 at about 5 a.m. after a marathon voting session in the Democratic-controlled chamber. Four Democratic senators facing tough re-election campaigns in 2014 joined all the Senate Republicans in opposing the measure, which seeks to raise nearly $1 trillion in new tax revenues by closing some tax breaks for the wealthy. The Senate budget, which reflects Democratic priorities of boosting near-term job growth and preserving social safety net programs, will square off in coming months against a Republican-focused budget passed by the Republican-dominated House of Representatives.

Neither of the non-binding blueprints has a chance of passage in the opposing chamber, leaving Congress no closer to resolving deep differences over how to shrink US deficits and grow the economy.

But they give each party a platform from which to tout their respective fiscal visions.

The Democrats’ plan from Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray aims to reduce deficits by $1.85 trillion over 10 years through an equal mix of tax increases and spending cuts.

The Republican plan from House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan seeks $4.6 trillion in savings over the same period without raising new taxes. It aims to reach a small surplus by 2023 through deep cuts to healthcare and social programs that aid the elderly and poor.

Murray said after the vote that she would try to work with Ryan on a path toward compromise.

“While it is clear that the policies, values,

and priorities of the Senate budget are very different than those articulated in the House budget, I know the American people are expecting us to work together to end the gridlock and find common ground, and I plan to continue doing exactly that.”

The White House welcomed the Senate move. “Today, the Senate passed a budget plan that will create jobs and cut the deficit in a balanced way,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said. “Now it is time for our leaders to come together to find

“We’re going to get a breather here.

Congress will let things cool off a bit and there’ll be other issues that come to the forefront in the spring,” said Greg Valliere, chief political strategist at Potomac Research Group, a firm that advises institutional investors on Washington politics.

These issues include legislation on gun control, immigration reform and initial work on simplifying the tax code, which is particularly important to Republicans.

Joining Republicans in opposing the

WASHINGTON: The setting sun is reflected in the windows of the US Capitol in Washington. An exhausted Senate gave pre-dawn approval yesterday to a Democratic $3.7 trillion budget for next year that embraces nearly $1 trillion in tax increases over the coming decade but shelters domestic programs targeted for cuts by House Republicans. —AP common ground. The president has put a plan on the table that reflects compromise, and he will continue to work with both sides to see if there is an opportunity to reach a solution to our budget challenges,” he said in a statement. Passage of a stopgap government funding measure on Thursday lowered the temperature in the budget debate by eliminating the threat of a government shutdown next week.

Democratic budget were Democratic senators from conservative-leaning states: Max Baucus of Montana, Mark Begich of Alaska, Kay Hagan of North Carolina and Mark Pryor of Arkansas. Voting for a budget that raises tax revenues could increase their vulnerability in congressional elections next year and put Democrats’ thin majority at risk. In the lead-up to the Senate vote early on Saturday morning, the body considered

more than 100 largely symbolic, non-binding amendments to the budget aimed at scoring political points and staking out positions. Among notable amendments, the Senate signaled strong support for allowing states more authority to collect sales taxes on Internet purchases, for approval of the controversial Canada-toTexas Keystone XL oil pipeline and for repealing a tax on medical devices imposed

by President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform law.

The Senate also voted 99-0 to end policies that subsidized large banks considered “too big to fail,” but came out against imposing taxes on industrial carbon emissions. Ryan’s plan aims to reach a small surplus with no tax increases by 2023 through deep cuts to social safety net programs.

This enables Republicans to claim that they are more responsible by balancing the budget. “The House budget changes our debt course, while the Senate budget does not,” said Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee.

In a taste of the ideological debates to come, Murray claimed that the Senate budget was more “balanced” because it emphasized job growth and offered an equal amount of revenue increases and spending cuts.

The Senate had not passed a budget resolution since 2009 because of fiscal policy disputes with House Republicans that forced Congress to turn to numerous stopgap spending measures to avoid government shutdowns. To protect their thin Senate majority, Democrats avoided exposing their members to potentially damaging votes to raise taxes ahead of 2012 elections, arguing that a 2011 budget deal set spending levels for several years and made the non-binding budget legislation unnecessary.—Reuters

their money back, Neophytou said. The plan would also secure some 8,000 jobs in Laiki Bank, although several hundred might be lost.

Neophytou’s plea came as the clock ticked down to a crucial meeting in Brussels today of euro-zone finance ministers and IMF chief Christine Lagarde in a bid to finalize the rescue package before Monday’s deadline. Laiki’s workforce-amounting to about one percent of Cyprus’ 840,000 population-reflects the bloated size of the island’s banking sector blamed by the EU for being behind the crisis. The economist Tirkides said people’s deposits over the 100,000 euro threshold would be “blocked” for years while the new bad bank absorbs its non-performing loans, which he put at about 30 percent of all Laiki lending. “ The philosophy seems to be that the banks who have the problem are the ones that should pay,” he said. — AFP

Fitch places Britain’s top rating on negative watch LONDON: Fitch announced on Friday that it had placed Britain’s toplevel AAA credit rating on watch for possible downgrade because the government’s latest forecasts expect debt to peak later and at a higher level than previously expected. The news came one month after rival agency Moody’s stripped Britain of a triple-A debt rating, saying government debt was still mounting and that growth was too weak to reverse the trend before 2016.

“Fitch Ratings has placed the United Kingdom’s ‘AAA’ Long-term Issuer Default Ratings on rating watch negative (RWN) indicating a heightened probability of a downgrade in the near term,” the agency said in a statement on Friday. This “reflects the latest economic and fiscal forecasts published by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) that indicate that UK government debt will peak later and at a higher level than previously expected”.

Fitch said it plans to complete its review of Britain by the end of April. Prime Minister David Cameron’s government said the announcement reflected the economic challenges it faced but insisted it would not be deterred from its austerity program designed to drive down a record budget deficit. “This underlines that there are no easy answers to problems built up over many years. But we are, slowly but surely, fixing our country’s economic problems,” a Treasury spokesman said.

“The deficit is down by a third and one and a quarter million new private sector jobs have been created.”

However, the opposition Labor party warned Fitch had dealt yet another blow to finance minister George Osborne, who used his annual budget on Wednesday to warn he would not change his course. “George Osborne’s plan has catastrophically failed on growth, living standards and the deficit,” said Labor’s Treasury spokesman, Chris Leslie. “But instead of a change of direction and action to kickstart the flatlining economy, all we got this week was more of the same failing policies.”

Gross government debt is now forecast to peak in 2016-17 at 100.8 percent of gross domestic product before starting to decline. “Fitch has previously stated that GGGD failing to stabilise below 100 percent of GDP and on a firm downward path towards 90 percent over the medium term would likely result in a downgrade of the UK’s sovereign ratings,” the agency said. Howard Archer, chief UK and European economist at the economic and financial analysis firm IHS Global Insight, said the decision was “entirely predictable”. “And there can be little doubt that the agency will follow through with a downgrade to AA,” he said. On Wednesday, Osborne unveiled another painful austerity budget that also slashed economic growth forecasts and raised borrowing estimates. The economy is now expected to grow by just 0.6 percent 2013, compared with previous guidance of a 1.2-percent expansion, according to the OBR. —AFP

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

BUSINESS

Ireland passes latest IMF program review

Bayt.com weekly report

Spring clean your career

By Lama Ataya

A morale-booster for ailing euro-zone states WASHINGTON: The International Monetary Fund said it was ready to disburse a fresh round of bailout funds to Ireland after completing a new review of the country’s reform program. The IMF said the ninth review concluded that Ireland’s “strong policy implementation has continued and positive signs are emerging” in the economy, after two years and three months under the 85-billioneuro ($110 billion) EU-IMF rescue. Completing the review means the IMF can disburse another 970 million euros from its 22.6-billion-euro share of the bailout.

“The Irish authorities have pursued steadfast policy implementation for more than two years and positive results are emerging,” said IMF First Deputy Managing Director David Lipton.

“Recent economic indicators suggest a nascent revival of domestic demand, Irish bond yields have fallen to pre-program levels, and the government’s market access has deepened.” The IMF said the country still faces significant challenges: unemployment above 14 percent, and a banking sector burdened by non-performing loans amounting to 25 percent of all loans. Lipton said that dealing with the bad loans problem “is a key to economic recovery.” He urged European authorities to quickly follow up on pledges to further support the government, which could help wean the banks from official support. That “would go a long way toward Ireland’s durable exit from drawing on official support,” Lipton said in a statement.

Early this month, EU finance ministers requested that the so-called troika of bailout lenders-the European Union, the European Central Bank and the IMF consider extending maturities on their Irish and Portuguese loans, to ease the burden on governments as they struggle to spark economic turnarounds.

Speaking in Dublin on March 8, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said the global crisis lender was open to changing the terms of Ireland’s bailout program. “We have an open mind about many issues, many of the terms and conditions of the exit strategy and as far as the adjustment to the loans,” she said.

Ireland’s expected exit from a European bailout program later this year should be a morale boost to other euro-zone countries in crisis, its European affairs minister said yesterday.

Speaking as politicians in Cyprus scrambled to meet a Monday deadline to secure a 10 billion euro ($13 billion) bailout and avert financial meltdown, Europe Minister Lucinda Creighton said Ireland’s “tough medicine” had worked. “We’re really confident that we will get out of the program this year,” Creighton told reporters at a meeting of European policymakers in Finnish Lapland.

“Hopefully we’ll provide not so much an example but an inspiration for other countries who are going through difficult times,” Creighton said. “If they see Ireland reenter the market, hopefully they’ll have the resolve and

KUWAIT: Spring is in the air, in our footstep and in the photo on the calendar you have proudly perched on your desk. At home spring cleaning has begun but in the office it’s more of the same. Here are seven tips that career experts from Bayt.com, the Middle East’s #1 Job Site, recommend to spring clean your professional life and welcome the season of rebirth: 1. Tidy your workspace. Start somewhere, anywhere and don’t stop till every drawer and file is familiar to you and has been organized and arranged. Toss out the unnecessary and make way for the new. You will likely stumble upon countless old To-do lists and snippets and cut-outs that you never got to and this may well be the right time to undertake these dormant ideas as viable projects.

2. Organize your computer files. Memory may be far from full on your desktop but why wait till then to clear out old files and duplicates? Is there a place for everything and is everything in its place? Revisit the logic of your online filing system and optimize the names and filing flows.

3. Do some reading. We all know you have borrowed, bought and been given a generous selection of books, magazines and online articles in the past year some of which you read and some of which need starting or completing. This is the time to take them off the shelf and start inhaling knowledge with the spring breeze. If you don’t have one yet, make a reading list fast and make sure it’s an ambitious one that contains all the latest industry tomes as well as popular business “classics”.

INARI: Finnish Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen (right) and Finnish Minister for European Affairs and Foreign Trade Alexander Stubb address the press during the informal Lapland meeting in Saariselka resort in Inari, Finland yesterday. — AFP

also the sense of hope that they can do it too.” Rescued two-and-a-half years ago with loans from the European Union and International Monetary Fund, Ireland earlier this month took a major step towards exiting the bailout with a successful sale of 5 billion euros of new benchmark 10-year bonds.

Creighton said Ireland’s experience proved that austerity measures were never easy but that debt-burdened euro-zone members had no choice. “I think we all know about tough medicine in Ireland. Unfortunately there are no easy solutions,” she said. “I think that we simply have to get on with it.” — Agencies

Tony Douglas new CEO of Abu Dhabi Airports Company ABU DHABI: Abu Dhabi Airports Company (ADAC), overseeing a multi-billion dollar airport expansion in the oil-rich emirate, yesterday said it appointed Tony Douglas as its chief executive.

Douglas, formerly CEO of Abu Dhabi Ports Company (ADPC), replaces James Bennet who resigned a month ago, a statement from ADAC said. Prior to joining ADPC,

Douglas was CEO at London Heathrow and chief operating officer at Laing O’Rourke, the international construction group.

Oil-rich Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, is investing billions of dollars in tourism, industry and infrastructure as it diversifies its economy away from oil. — Reuters

Gulf Bank announces winners of Al-Danah daily draws KUWAIT: Gulf Bank held its Al-Danah daily draws on March 17, 2013, announcing the names of its winners for the week of March 10 to 14. The Al-Danah daily draws include draws each working day for two prizes of KD1000 per winner.

The Al-Danah daily winners are: (Sunday 10/3): Ali M ostafa Asad Amour, Eid Khulaif Awad Al-Rashidi (Monday 11/3): Mohammed Abdulasad Aleem, Mahmoud Abdulghani Al-Afandi ( Tuesday 12/3): M ahdi M esfer Al-Ajmi, Naser Mohammed Abdulla Al-Meshaal (Wednesday 13/3) Saad Ahmad Saad Al-Adwani, Wafaa Sultan Rashed Al-Mezaiel (Thursday 14/3) Gina Salijumba Josoul,

Bader Yousef Mohammed Al-Nasralla.

Gulf Bank ’s new Al-Danah 2013 draw lineup includes daily draws (2 winners per working day each receive KD1000), as well as two additional prizes per quarter. Al Danah’s 1st Quarterly draw will be held on 28 March (KD200,000, KD125,000, and KD25,000), 2nd Quar ter - 27 June (KD250,000, K D 1 2 5 , 0 0 0 , a n d K D 2 5 , 0 0 0 ) , 3 rd Q u a r te r - 2 6 September (KD500,000, KD125,000, and KD25,000) and the final draw held on 9 January, 2014 announcing winners of KD50,000, KD250,000 and the Al Danah Millionaire.

Gulf Bank’s Al-Danah allows customers to win cash prizes and simultaneously encourages them to

save money. Chances increase the more money is deposited and the longer it is kept in the account.

Al-Danah also offers a number of unique services including the Al-Danah Deposit Only ATM card which helps account holders deposit their money at their convenience; as well as the Al Danah calculator to help customers calculate their chances of becoming an Al-Danah winner.

To be part of the Al-Danah draws, customers can visit one of Gulf Bank’s 56 branches, transfer on line, or call the Customer Contact Center on 1805805 for assistance and guidance. Customers can also log on to www.e-gulfbank.com/aldanahwinners, to find out more about Al Danah and who the winners are.

Philippine Peso Thai Baht Irani Riyal - transfer Irani Riyal - cash

Omani Riyal Qatari Riyal Saudi Riyal

4. Polish old relationships. Did winter cast a shadow on some old client relationships? Take this as an opportunity to call them with a cheerful voice and ask for a meeting to fix this relationship gone cold.

5. Get back into your exercise routine. Walk, bike or jog to work. Good weather calls for increased outdoor activity and you will feel far more invigorated in your work day and ready to take on the world if you have started it off with a bit of exercise. Don’t worry if outdoor pursuits are difficult where you live; replicate the spirit with a vigorous daily morning workout at home or in the gym. Even if you don’t feel you can commit to a strict exercise regimen all year don’t miss the chance to shape up this spring and feel that much healthier, fitter and smarter in your business suit all summer.

6. Brighten the mood. Place a smile on your face and commit to publicly praising achievements of any team members who deserve it; be generous and genuine in your praise. Spread good cheer and look for random acts of kindness you can do around the office.

7. Refresh your CV. If you feel it’s time for a career change there is no point in postponing the inevitable. Are you one among the 65.3% of professionals whose top professional resolution was to get a better job this year (Bayt.com’s New Year Resolutions poll)? If that’s the case, then it’s time to refresh your online CV on a leading regional jobsite, such as on Bayt.com, and update your online public profile so employers can find you. Remember thousands of fresh jobs are posted daily on reputed leading jobsites such as Bayt.com and countless others are unadvertised as employers find candidates directly online through the search mechanism on these sites without advertising them. You may wish to create a Bayt.com public profile, set up an automatic saved search to get updates on jobs that match your profile and subscribe to the regular free newsletters simply to see what great opportunities are out there.

You never know what top employers are searching for at any point in time; your next great job may well be only a few clicks away.

EXCHANGE RATES Commercial Bank of Kuwait US Dollar/KD GB Pound/KD Euro Swiss francs Canadian Dollar Australian DLR Indian rupees Sri Lanka Rupee UAE dirhams Bahraini dinars Jordanian dinar Saudi riyals Omani riyals Egyptian pounds

.2770000 .4290000 .3650000 .2990000 .2750000 .2930000 .0040000 .0020000 .0771240 .7513970 .3920000 .0720000 .7366120 .0370000

CUSTOMER TRANSFER RATES US Dollar/KD .2841000 GB Pound/KD .4315340 Euro .3669010 Swiss francs .3004120 Canadian dollars .2774010 Danish Kroner .0492270 Swedish Kroner .0438030 Australian dlr .2954070 Hong Kong dlr .0366000 Singapore dlr .2271160 Japanese yen .0029760 Indian Rs/KD .0000000 Sri Lanka rupee .0000000 Pakistan rupee .0000000 Bangladesh taka .0000000 UAE dirhams .0773800 Bahraini dinars .7538810 Jordanian dinar .0000000 Saudi Riyal/KD .0757800 Omani riyals .7382100 Philippine Peso .0000000

Al-Muzaini Exchange Co. Japanese Yen Indian Rupees Pakistani Rupees Srilankan Rupees Nepali Rupees Singapore Dollar Hongkong Dollar Bangladesh Taka

ASIAN COUNTRIES 2.987 5.283 2.906 2.251 3.313 229.280 36.787 3.614

.2880000 .4410000 .3790000 .3170000 .2900000 .3000000 .0068000 .0035000 .0778990 .7589480 .4110000 .0770000 .7440150 .0440000

.2862000 .4347230 .3696130 .3026330 .2794510 .0495910 .0441260 .2975910 .0368710 .2287950 .0029980 .0053060 .0022620 .0029240 .0036650 .0779520 .7593210 .4048090 .0763400 .7436660 .0070810

7.009 9.730 0.271 0.273

741.47 78.67 76.17

738.000 78.500 76.400

Dollarco Exchange Co. Ltd GCC COUNTRIES 76.150 78.463 741.720 758.470 77.758

Saudi Riyal Qatari Riyal Omani Riyal Bahraini Dinar UAE Dirham

Rate for Transfer US Dollar Canadian Dollar Sterling Pound Euro Swiss Frank Bahrain Dinar UAE Dirhams Qatari Riyals Saudi Riyals Jordanian Dinar Egyptian Pound Sri Lankan Rupees Indian Rupees Pakistani Rupees Bangladesh Taka Philippines Pesso Cyprus pound Japanese Yen Thai Bhat Syrian Pound Nepalese Rupees Malaysian Ringgit

ARAB COUNTRIES Egyptian Pound - Cash 41.450 Egyptian Pound - Transfer 41.410 Yemen Riyal/for 1000 1.332 Tunisian Dinar 182.160 Jordanian Dinar 403.260 Lebanese Lira/for 1000 1.916 Syrian Lier 3.102 Morocco Dirham 33.821 EUROPEAN & AMERICAN COUNTRIES US Dollar Transfer 285.450 Euro 371.090 Sterling Pound 432.740 Canadian dollar 280.400 Swiss Franc 303.030 US Dollar Buying 284.250

Bahrain Exchange Company

GOLD 298.000 150.000 77.500

20 Gram 10 Gram 5 Gram

CURRENCY

UAE Exchange Centre WLL COUNTRY Australian Dollar Canadian Dollar Swiss Franc Euro US Dollar Sterling Pound Japanese Yen Bangladesh Taka Indian Rupee Sri Lankan Rupee Nepali Rupee Pakistani Rupee UAE Dirhams Bahraini Dinar Egyptian Pound Jordanian Dinar

SELL DRAFT 301.87 282.61 306.86 372.54 284.90 436.59 3.08 3.646 5.248 2.246 3.293 2.908 77.64 758.58 41.29 405.87

Selling Rate 285.400 281.140 431.700 369.235 301.625 755.605 77.680 78.340 76.070 402.320 41.472 2.252 5.254 2.901 3.625 7.001 700.101 4.000 9.840 4.035 3.370 91.210

SELL CASH 298.500 280.600 307.000 373.500 285.000 432.900 3.300 3.720 5.350 2.450 3.420 2.880 78.000 755.600 41.600 411.000

BUY Europe 0.4242726 0.0061692 0.0455304 0.3643856 0.0448508 0.4207760 0.0401550 0.2970149

0.4332726 0.0181692 0.0505304 0.3718856 0.0500508 0.4282760 0.0451550 0.3040149

Australasia 0.2860496 0.2269600 0.0001104

0.2980496 0.2369600 0.0001104

Canadian Dollar Colombian Peso US Dollars

America 0.2713969 0.0001486 0.2831500

0.2803969 0.0001666 0.2853000

Bangladesh Taka Cape Vrde Escudo

Asia 0.0035853 0.0031668

0.0036403 0.0033968

British Pound Czech Korune Danish Krone Euro Norwegian Krone Scottish Pound Swedish Krona Swiss Franc Australian Dollar New Zealand Dollar Uganda Shilling

SELL

Chinese Yuan Eritrea-Nakfa Guinea Franc Hong Kong Dollar Indian Rupee Indonesian Rupiah Jamaican Dollars Japanese Yen Kenyan Shilling Malaysian Ringgit Nepalese Rupee Pakistan Rupee Philippine Peso Sierra Leone Singapore Dollar Sri Lankan Rupee Thai Baht

0.0448488 0.0164967 0.0000443 0.0342559 0.0051946 0.0000244 0.0028524 0.0029195 0.0032790 0.0872766 0.0031260 0.0028777 0.0065512 0.0000729 0.2239600 0.0019508 0.0093921

0.0498488 0.0195967 0.0000503 0.0373559 0.0052646 0.0000295 0.0038524 0.0030995 0.0035090 0.0942766 0.0033260 0.0029177 0.0070212 0.0000759 0.2299600 0.0022558 0.0099921

Bahraini Dinar Egyptian Pound Ethiopeanbirr Ghanaian Cedi Iranian Riyal Iraqi Dinar Jordanian Dinar Kuwaiti Dinar Lebanese Pound Moroccan Dirhams Nigerian Naira Omani Riyal Qatar Riyal Saudi Riyal Sudanese Pounds Syrian Pound Tunisian Dinar UAE Dirhams Yemeni Riyal

Arab 0.7507353 0.0394262 0.0130051 0.1485901 0.0000794 0.0001737 0.3970410 1.0000000 0.0001751 0.0217375 0.0012139 0.7304183 0.0777507 0.0755867 0.0501336 0.0031853 0.1796603 0.0762902 0.0012878

0.7592353 0.0414562 0.0195051 0.1503801 0.0000799 0.0002337 0.4045410 1.0000000 0.0001951 0.0457375 0.0018489 0.7414183 0.0785337 0.0762267 0.0506836 0.0034053 0.1856603 0.0777402 0.0013878

Al Mulla Exchange Currency US Dollar Euro Pound Sterling Canadian Dollar Japanese Yen Indian Rupee Egyptian Pound Sri Lankan Rupee Bangladesh Taka Philippines Peso Pakistan Rupee Bahraini Dinar UAE Dirham Saudi Riyal

Transfer Rate (Per 1000) 284.800 371.750 432.650 280.300 3.010 5.265 41.405 2.257 3.614 7.000 2.905 758.550 77.600 76.080

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

BUSINESS

Kuwait inflation eases to 2.3% as food prices fall NBK ECONOMIC REPORT KUWAIT: The Consumer Price Index (CPI) slowed to a 2.3% year-on-year (y/y) increase in January, down from 2.6% in December and a 2.9% average for 2012.

The deceleration stemmed mostly from a fall in the y/y rate for food prices, with other components - namely ‘other goods and services’ and ‘clothing and footwear’ - playing a smaller role in the slowdown.

Core inflation, which excludes food and beverage prices, recorded 2.6% y/y in January, similar to December’s 2.7%.

The core inflation measure outpaced its general counterpart for the second consecutive month, reflecting a change in the sources of inflationary pressures.

Previous major sources of upward pressure such as food prices have become a softening force and have been replaced by other components.

Food prices were up a mere 1.0% y/y in January, their smallest rise in recent years and a drop from 2.1% y/y in December. The slowdown in this component alone pushed the overall y/y

inflation rate down by 0.2 percentage points. The deceleration in January came mostly from two major sub-components: fruits and vegetables prices were up 4.6% y/y, a drop from 6.8% in December, while meat, poultry and fish saw a second month of deflation, with prices dropping 1.4% y/y after decreasing by 0.3% y/y in December. Food prices overall were also down 0.6%

m/m, after a similar drop of 0.7% m/m in December.

The cost of housing services, the largest component of the consumer basket, rose 2.4% y/y in January, unchanged from December. The component is made up almost wholly (95%) of housing rent, which went up by a similar 2.5% y/y. The remaining 5% of housing services is made up of utilities (water, fuel, and pow-

er), which stayed flat y/y, and in fact rarely sees any movement.

Inflation in the transportation and communication segment stood at 2.9% y/y, up from 2.6% in December. The communication part of the component was actually flat y/y, while transportation prices were up 3.3% y/y, with saloon automobile (sedan car) prices increasing by 6.7% y/y, their steepest rise in recent

history. At just 2.3% y/y, overall inflation has started 2013 at a relatively subdued level. Nonetheless, we do expect some modest upward pressure on prices as the year progresses, with inflation averaging 3.5% for the full year. The sources of inflationary pressures could be both international - such as higher food or import prices - and local - such as somewhat higher rents.

India eases debt rules to woo foreigners NEW DELHI: India’s government yesterday loosened debt market rules to draw more foreign investment to finance a record current account deficit as it promised a “next generation” of economic reforms. Finance Minister P

funds. He also said a “next generation” of reforms to further pry open the still heavily regulated economy and return it to high growth was in the works.

But he warned fallout from the euro-zone crisis was hitting invest-

current account deficit-the gap between inflow and outflow of foreign currency-widened to a record $22.3 billion, or 5.4 percent of gross domestic product, in the financial quarter ended September as imports outstripped exports.

BHORU: Indian farmers check the quality of fish during a fish farming fair at Bhoru village on the outskirts of Amritsar yesterday. Hundreds of farmers from Punjab state visited the city to attend the fair to educate farmers about fish farming. —AFP Chidambaram announced a significant simplification of rules for placements by foreign institutional investors in government and corporate debt to lure more overseas

ment in Asia’s third-largest economy even as attracting more foreign funds has become an urgent priority for the government to fund a bloated current account deficit. The

The new rules unveiled by Chidambaram will allow foreign investors to invest up to $25 billion in long-term government bonds, an increase from $15 billion, and

Burgan Bank’s X-Change card for medical treatment abroad KUWAIT: Burgan Bank announced that individuals travelling for medical treatment abroad can now benefit from the use of the bank’s new multi-currency X-change card from MasterCard. Features such as the ability to reload online, and locking the currency on the card, makes the X-Change Card from Burgan Bank an essential travel companion for individuals getting medical attention abroad.

The X-Change Card can be issued in US Dollars, EUROs, and British Pounds which makes it the ideal companion for accessing countries that provide the best medical services.

Customers wishing to obtain the multi-currency X-Change card may do so through following 3 simple steps, which are logging into the bank’s website https://cards.burgan.com/xchange to fill in their personal details, selecting the currency of choice, and finally receiving and loading the card from the nearest Burgan Bank branch.

To find out more about Burgan Bank’s multi-currency X-Change card from MasterCard, or any of its products and services, customers are urged to visit any of the bank’s branches, or contact the call center on 1804080.

Established in 1977, Burgan Bank is the youngest commercial Bank and third largest by assets in Kuwait, with a significant focus on the corporate and financial institutions sectors, as well as having a growing retail and private bank customer base.

Burgan Bank has five majority owned subsidiaries, which include Gulf Bank Algeria AGB (Algeria), Bank of Baghdad - BOB (Iraq & Lebanon), Jordan Kuwait Bank - JKB (Jordan) Tunis International Bank - TIB (Tunisia), and fully owned Burgan Bank - Turkey, (collectively known as the “Burgan Bank Group”).

The Bank has continuously improved its performance over the years through an expanded revenue structure, diversified funding sources, and a strong capital base. The adoption of state-of-the-art services and technology has positioned it as a trendsetter in the domestic market and within the MENA region.

Burgan Bank’s brand has been created on

a foundation of real values - of trust, commitment, excellence and progression, to remind us of the high standards to which we aspire.

‘People come first’ is the foundation on which its products and services are developed.

Earlier this year, ‘Brand Finance’ - the international brand valuation company- rated Burgan Bank brand as AA with positive outlook. The rating places Burgan Bank Brand at 2nd amongst the most valuable banking brands in Kuwait.

Excellence is one of the Bank’s four key values and Burgan Bank continually strives to maintain the highest standards in the industry. The Bank was re-certified in 2010 with the ISO 9001:2008 certification in all its banking businesses, making it the first bank in the GCC, and the only bank in Kuwait to receive such accreditation. The Bank also has to its credit the distinction of being the only Bank in Kuwait to have won the JP Morgan Chase Quality Recognition Award for twelve consecutive years.

Burgan Bank won the prestigious “Banking Web Awards” prize in the commercial and corporate Category for Kuwait. In 2010 Burgan Bank was awarded with the “Best Internet Banking Service award” from Banker Middle East Awards. Burgan Bank was recognized in 2011 as Kuwait’s “Best Private Bank”, by World Finance. The bank also won, in 2011, the coveted “International Platinum Star for Quality” award from Business Initiative Directions, and “The Best Technical Award” from Banking Web Awards. In 2012, Global Banking and Finance Review online magazine recognized Burgan Bank as the “Best Banking Group in the MENA” as well as the “Best Corporate Bank in Kuwait”.

The bank also won the coveted “Best Bank Branding” award by the Banker Middle East.

For the second consecutive year in 2012, Burgan Bank also won World Finance’s “Best Private Bank” award, as well as the “Best Private Bank in Kuwait 2012” award from Capital Finance International. The bank recently won the “Best Bank in Kuwait” award from EMEA Finance.

the sum could be hiked, depending on government financing needs.

The investment cap by foreigners in corporate bonds will remain $51 billion but rules that stifled foreign inflows will be streamlined, he said.

There will just be two investment “baskets”-one for government securities and one for all corporate bonds, he told an economic editors’ conference. India has been traditionally hesitant to allow widespread foreign access to its debt markets to avoid excess reliance on overseas investors.

But the high current account deficit has prompted it to rethink regulations as it seeks to avert threat of a downgrade by global credit ratings agencies.

“The current account deficit can be financed only through foreign inflows,” Chidambaram told the conference. He added the government had “travelled a considerable distance on the road” to putting its financial house in order and reducing regulation suffocating economic activity.

Last year, the Congress-led government initiated a string of liberalization measures to open up sectors such as retail, insurance and aviation to foreign investors in a bid to jumpstart growth before it faces voters in 2014. It has also partially deregulated fuel prices to lower a huge subsidy bill.

But economists say further liberalization is needed to spur the economy-projected to expand by 5.0 percent this fiscal year to March 31, the weakest pace in a decade.

“We are steadily and surely working on the next generation of reforms,” Chidambaram said. —AFP

Hispanic-Americans help drive growth in US coffee consumption SAN FRANCISCO: Hispanic-Americans are leading the way in growing coffee consumption in the United States, while the number of adults under 40 who enjoy the popular drink on a daily basis has dropped, according to an industry study released on Friday.

Of the Hispanic-Americans who participated in the National Coffee Association’s (NCA) National Coffee Drinking Trends 2013 market study, 76 percent said they had drunk coffee the previous day. That is up by 13 percentage points from last year. This compares with 47 percent of African-Americans and 64 percent of Caucasian-Americans who said they had consumed coffee the day before.

This was the second year that the study included ethnicity. The survey showed that overall coffee consumption jumped by 5 percentage points this year, with 83 percent of the US adult population now drinking coffee within the past year. Daily consumption was flat at 63 percent.

Overall daily coffee consumption by adults aged 18-39, however, has dropped. Some 16 percent of the people in this age group who participated in the online survey said they had drunk an espresso-based coffee in the past day. That compared with 6 percent of those aged 60 and over. But younger consumers have cut their daily consumption of the brew overall.

“In traditional coffee, we did see a decline,” said Mark DiDomenico, of market research firm Datassential, as he presented the study’s findings at the National Coffee Association USA convention in San Francisco on Friday. Among those aged 18 to 24, only 41 percent said they drank coffee daily, down sharply from 50 percent in 2012. For those aged 25-39, it dropped to 59 percent from 63 percent, the study showed.

“However, the 2013 figures are more consistent with levels in earlier years, suggesting that this year’s decline indicates volatility in these segments rather than softening,” the NCA stated in a release.

On the other hand, those aged 60 and above have upped their daily intake, with 76 percent of the respondents saying they drank coffee every day, versus 71 percent a year ago.

Young adults between 18 and 24 greatly reduced their daily intake of non-gourmet traditional coffee, dropping to 17 percent from 27 percent last year, the study showed.

The single-serve format, which involves machines designed to brew one cup at a time with what are called individual “pods” of coffee, continued to grow. The study showed that 13 percent of the US population drank coffee made in a single-cup brewer the previous day, up from 10 percent in 2012.

“Drip coffee maker use seems to be slowly falling,” DiDomenico said. —Reuters

President Barack Obama gives his State of the Union address during a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington. Obama used Washington’s grandest stage — the State of the Union speech — to announce negotiations with Europe aimed at creating the world’s largest free trade agreement. —AP

US urged to endorse Japan bid to enter trade pact WASHINGTON: Japan’s ambassador urged Washington on Friday to endorse Tokyo’s bid to enter a US-backed Pacific trade pact, pushing back against the concerns of American automakers, but not dismissing them. Last week, Japan’s new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, announced Tokyo’s desire to enter negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, in what could be a strategic boost for the Obama administration’s expanded engagement in Asia. But US automakers in particular are worried about access to Japan’s market.

Ambassador to the US Kenichiro Sasae told the Brookings Institution think tank that Japan has shifted from localized production of vehicles and that its automakers employ 388,000 people in the US. He said that while there are few auto imports from the US, cars are coming in from Europe.

Japan’s auto tariffs are almost zero and “generally the market is open,” he said, but added: “We have to address remaining barriers, if there are any.” At a congressional hearing this week, a Democratic senator complained that Japan exports 120 automobiles to the US for every American vehicle sold to Japan and that an undervalued yen is giving it an unfair advantage to Japanese producers.

Sasae stressed the strategic importance of the trade pact for Washington’s strategic rebalance to the region and said Japan’s participation in TPP would help revive both nations’ economies. Without Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, he said, “there’s no sustainable free trade in the AsiaPacific.”

Japan’s GDP exceeds the combined total of the 10 other nations negotiating the pact with the United States, aimed at reducing duties on a wide range of goods and services and ease regulatory and other nontariff barriers to trade. Other participants include Australia, Canada, Mexico and Vietnam.

China, the world’s second-largest economy, is not taking part. Sasae said Abe, who took power in December vowing to boost growth, had spent a great deal of political capital in seeking TPP entry. The pact is opposed by Japan’s heavily subsidized farmers, who are influential in Abe’s own party.

He said Japan is sensitive to the concerns of US industry, and he urged the US to be sensitive to Japanese agriculture, in pursuit of the “higher goal” of building regional free trade. Senators at this week’s hearing, however, sought assurances from the Obama administration Japan would not get special treatment. —AP

India refuses to extend Vodafone unit licenses NEW DELHI: India’s government has told the Indian unit of British mobile phone giant Vodafone that its licenses for three big cities cannot be extended and it will have to bid again, the company said yesterday. The government has also refused to extend the licenses of India’s mobile carrier Bharti Airtel, the sector leader by subscribers, in the same three lucrative urban centers, according to local media.

“Vodafone is deeply disappointed with the summary rejection of its request for extension of licenses in the Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata service areas,” the company said in an emailed statement.

There was no immediate comment from Bharti. The refusal to extend the licenses is one of a raft of regulatory issues faced by mobile operators in the world’s second-largest cellular market by subscribers after China. Vodafone, the second largest carrier, and Bharti, have been at war with the Congress-led government over its demand that they bid again for spectrum in the three cities where they have been operating for nearly two decades. Their licenses are due to expire in November 2014. “Unless you participate in auctions and get your bid confirmed, you would not be entitled to a

a wireless license,” the telecom ministry told Vodafone, according to local media.

Vodafone said the decision showed no acknowledgment of the company’s pioneering role in “entering the market when there was no concept of mobile telephony in India” or for its investment of huge sums to set up a network.

Last month both Vodafone, which is also embroiled in a $2-billion tax row with the Indian government, and Bharti filed separate court challenges to the government’s decision to sell mobile airwaves in the three cities. “Vodafone believes it is entitled to a fair and reasonable extension of its license as per mutually agreeable terms,” the company said in a February statement.

Bharti, which is also demanding that the government renew its existing license, said its decision to go to court was aimed at protecting its legal rights and “ensuring business continuity”.

The government has been hoping to use money raised from spectrum auctions to help plug a gaping fiscal deficit.

But last month, it postponed the auction of some telecommunications frequencies as it got no applications from bidders. —AFP

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

BUSINESS

US market exodus from bonds? Not yet NEW YORK: Market pros call it the Great Rotation.

That’s the long-awaited scenario when investors take their money out of bonds and sink it into stocks. It was the buzzword this month when the Dow Jones industrial average reached a record high. The idea was that investors were confident enough in the economy to shed their financial crisis fears and leave the safety of bonds.

But it’s not happening. Money keeps flowing into bonds. Industry consultant Strategic Insight says US bond mutual funds have attracted $64 billion in cash in the first two months of the year, just below last year’s pace of $68 billion over the same period.

Stock mutual funds had net deposits of $76 billion through February, according to the consultancy. While that is up sharply from $14 billion a year earlier, the cash for stocks is not coming at the expense of bonds, according to more recent snapshots of investment flows.

Instead, investors are withdrawing from moneymarket funds, which are often used as a parking spot for cash, according to EPFR Global. “The expectations of a big exodus from bonds are way overblown,” says David Santschi, CEO of TrimTabs Investment Research, a fund-tracking firm.

A stock market crash and recession have made bonds especially appealing since 2008, when America was in the throes of the financial crisis. The abundance of buyers has pushed bond prices up and sent yields lower, reducing interest payments

to investors. Even with low yields, bonds will continue to attract retiring baby boomers and others who want reliable income for daily expenses. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note - a benchmark is hovering under 2 percent. Other types offer higher yields. Investment-grade corporate bonds yield 3 percent and riskier “junk” bonds yield just under 6 percent.

Money-market funds, meanwhile, yield 0.02 percent. Still, the Dow’s record surge is drawing more attention to stocks. The blue-chip index broke through its all-time high March 5 and kept climbing. It’s up nearly 11 percent this year and 122 percent from its bottom in March 2009. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500 index is up 9 percent and is close to breaking its own record.

Investors added $8 billion to US stock funds and exchange-traded funds in February. And they’re putting in more cash this month, as $12 billion flowed into stock funds and ETFs through Tuesday, according to EPFR Global. Bond funds, including ETFs, have pulled in nearly $8 billion this month.

Much of the money flowing into stocks and bonds has come out of money-market funds.

About $32 billion has been pulled out of money funds this month, according to EPFR Global.

Withdrawals that didn’t go directly into stock or bond mutual funds could have gone into bank accounts, covered daily expenses or been used for other needs. Investors also could have used the money to buys stocks or bonds directly rather than

through funds. If the money keeps flowing, this would be the first year since 2006 that more cash was invested in US stock funds than withdrawn from them, according to Strategic Insight Pension funds, 401(k) retirement plans and other institutional investors are typically the largest contributors to daily stock fund flows. But individuals also have been moving in recently, according to EPFR Global.

The market’s gains over the past four years could have been larger, had individuals been investing more in stock mutual funds. In the runup, much of the buying has come from companies repurchasing their own stock. Companies in the S&P 500 have bought $1.5 trillion since the Great Recession began in December 2007. Hedge funds, foreign investors and others who don’t own mutual funds bought as well. ETFs have also attracted cash, helping to support the rising market.

There is more fuel for stocks to continue soaring. Dividend payments are headed for a record year and companies keep buying back stock.

Boards approved $118 billion in buybacks last month, the largest single-month total ever, according to research firm Birinyi Associates.

Richard Peterson, a psychiatrist and founder of MarketPsych, which advises banks and big money managers, says news coverage of the Dow’s run is likely luring people who had remained wary of stocks since the financial crisis in 2008. One fear gets replaced with another. “It’s the fear of missing

out on a good thing,” he says. “People are watching it go up without them.” Matthew Lemieux, an analyst with fund tracker Lipper Inc., warns that the increased investment in stock mutual funds doesn’t mean the Great Rotation is coming. At the beginning of 2011, stock funds attracted cash four months in a row, the strongest start to a year since 2006. But the cash began to dry up in the spring and summer. Investors worried about the debt crisis in Europe and a fight between Congress and the White House over raising the government’s borrowing limit.

Stocks have pulled back slightly over the past week amid renewed concerns about Europe and the possibility of bankruptcy in the Mediterranean island nation of Cyprus. At home, Congress and the White House continue to clash, unable to reach broad agreement to head off automatic spending cuts. Justin Beal, a 39-year-old municipal fire inspector from Clovis, Califfornia, believes the stock market will continue to remain at or near record levels in the coming months. But that’s partly due to the Federal Reserve’s policy of maintaining historically low interest rates through its bond-buying program, he thinks. The program will have to be pulled back or ended at some point, potentially ending the stock market’s surge. “The records don’t really mean a lot,” Beal says. “The average guy needs to understand that you can’t be jumping on the bandwagon at the end of the rally, when it’s greed that’s driving the market.” — AP

Cyprus bailout bid: Edge of an Abyss Cypriot banks in throes of turmoil

NICOSIA: Cyprus lawmakers vote on key bills aimed at securing a broader bailout package from international creditors in parliament in capital Nicosia Friday. Cyprus lawmakers have approved three key bills aiming to raise enough money to qualify the country for a broader bailout package and help it avoid financial ruin. — AP

Japan’s ANA delays retiring planes amid 787 woes TOKYO: Japan’s All Nippon Airways will delay retiring four aircraft to help maintain services already hit by the grounding of its entire fleet of troubled 787 Dreamliners, Kyodo News reported yesterday.

International regulators grounded all Boeing Dreamliner jets in January after a battery on a Japan Airlines 787 caught fire and forced an ANA flight to make an emergency landing. ANA had initially planned to retire a Boeing 747 jumbo jet in April and three other smaller aircraft-including the Airbus A320 — between March and May, but their retirements will be postponed to June or later, Kyodo said.

The aircraft are currently being used for domestic flights amid the cancellation of

domestic and international services while the Dreamliners remain grounded, it said.

The firm is also seeking to introduce three Boeing 777 jets earlier than planned to minimize the impact of the no-fly order, it added.

Immediate confirmation of the report from ANA was not available. The carrier said late in February that it was cancelling 1,714 flights in April and May, a period that includes Japan’s busy Golden Week holidays, taking the total affected to more than 3,600 since January. Boeing said last week that the 50 planes grounded around the world since two lithium-ion battery malfunctions sparked a global no-fly order in mid-January would undergo fixes to their systems and be operational again soon. — AFP

NICOSIA: Cyprus’s bid to avert financial collapse will go down to the wire after the island said it would hold a crucial sitting of parliament only after finance ministers of the 17-nation eurozone meet.

Cyprus faces a Monday deadline to clinch a 10 billion euro ($13 billion) bailout from the European Union or the European Central Bank sauys it will cut off emergency funding to the country’s stricken banks, spelling certain collapse and potentially pushing the island out of Europe’s single currency.

Lawmakers are expected to debate a possible levy on big depositors in Cypriot banks to help secure the 5.8 billion euros demanded by the European Union before it gives the nod to the bailout.

But with euro-zone finance ministers due to meet on Sunday afternoon, a senior lawmaker in Nicosia told Reuters the island’s tiny legislature would wait until after the Brussels meeting to hold its debate.

“We will meet after the Eurogroup meeting,” the lawmaker, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters. “I don’t know when.” A government official, who also declined to be named, said Cypriot officials were to hold talks with representatives from the so-called ‘troika’ of lenders - the EU, ECB and International Monetary Fund - yesterday.

The official said President Nicos Anastasiades, barely a month in office and wrestling with Cyprus’s worst crisis since an invasion by Turkish forces in 1974 split the country in two, may head to Brussels depending on the outcome of the troika talks, though formal meetings are not expected until today.

Racing to placate its European partners, Cypriot lawmakers voted in a late-night session on Friday to nationalize state pensions and split failing lenders into good and bad banks. They also gave the government powers to impose capital controls on banks, anticipating a flood of money from the island when banks are due to reopen on Tuesday after more than a week of lockdown.

PLUS-20% LEVY? Signalling a dramatic U-turn, officials said they were near agreement to tax deposits of over 100,000 euros in at least one Cypriot bank, having angrily rejected a similar measure on Tuesday branding it “bank robbery”.

The turnaround came after Russia rebuffed Cypriot entreaties to help its banks, where Russian citizens and other foreigners have billions of euros at stake.

Cypriots were enraged by plans to hit small holdings of ordinary savers as well as large

accounts. Many of the biggest depositors are foreigners, including rich Russians, and European politicians are loathe to spend taxpayers’ money on a bailout if the depositors take no losses.

Cypriot leaders, however, fear the damage the levy would do to the country’s offshore banking industry. The tottering banks hold 68 billion euros in deposits, including 38 billion in accounts of more than 100,000 euros - enormous sums for an island of 1.1 million people which could never sustain such a big financial system on its own.

Much of the banks’ capital was wiped out by

power to potentially split the good and bad assets of Bank of Cyprus and No 2 lender Cyprus Popular Bank, also known as Laiki, and to protect deposits that enjoy a state guarantee of up to 100,000 euros.

“With the process of consolidation, the depositors over 100,000 euros will wait for several years to see how much of their deposits they will collect,” said Averof Neophytou, deputy leader of the ruling Democratic Rally party.

“At the same time, this political decision to support this harsh law safeguards 100 percent of the deposits of 361,000 depositors in Laiki Bank,”

NICOSIA: People gather at a coffee shop in Nicosia’s Old City yesterday. Cyprus Finance Minister Michalis Sarris reported “significant progress” in talks with EU-led creditors, but said that there were also some unresolved issues that still had to be addressed. — AFP investments in Greece, the epicentre of the euro zone debt crisis. Party officials told Reuters that discussions were now centred on a 20 percentplus levy on depositors holding over 100,000 euros, possibly only at the island’s biggest lender, Bank of Cyprus.

The plan to nationalize semi-state pension funds has, however, met with resistance, particularly from Germany which made clear that tapping pensions could by even more painful for ordinary Cypriots than a deposit levy. Taking a first step toward financial consolidation, Cyprus arranged on Friday for the takeover of big Greek units of its two biggest banks by a Greek competitor.

Lawmakers then gave the government the

he added, referring to depositors with up to 100,000 euros.

The pace of the unfolding drama has stunned Cypriots, who have besieged bank cash machines since the levy was first mooted a week ago. “Our so-called friends and partners sold us out,” said Marios Panayides, 65, a protester at the parliament. “They have completely abandoned us on the edge of an abyss.”

Retailers, facing cash-on-delivery demands from suppliers, warned stocks were running low. “At the moment, supplies will last another two or three days,” said Adamos Hadijadamou, head of Cyprus’s Association of Supermarkets.

“We’ll have a problem if this is not resolved by next week.” — Reuters

Record $16bn crop insurance payout stirs subsidy debate DES MOINES, Iowa: Farmers will be paid a record $16 billion in crop insurance claims for 2012 because of the widespread drought, a staggering amount that has critics calling for changes to what they say is an inefficient taxpayer subsidy the government cannot afford.

While farmers buy crop insurance from private companies, the federal government subsidizes their premiums and picks up the tab for losses over a certain amount. One analyst estimates the federal tab for 2012 will come to about $11 billion.

It is the second year in a row that US farmers have received record crop insurance payments as flooding and drought in 2011 was followed by an even worse drought last year. The $16 billion in payments also comes as lawmakers working on a new farm bill have been considering a shift from disaster relief to crop insurance as a more predicable way of protecting farmers from natural disasters.

Farmers say they must have some kind of protection or a year like the past two could put them out of business. Ben Steffen, who has crops and livestock near Humboldt, Neb., said he had insurance to cover threefourths of his losses last year when drought took about a third of his corn and soybeans and two-fifths of his hay. Farmers can buy insurance that covers from 50 per-

cent to 85 percent of the revenue they would have earned and pay premiums based on their coverage.

“It’s not a money-making proposition,” Steffen said.

“It’s a way to keep you from getting buried by a disaster.” The most recent report from the Federal Crop Insurance Corp, released Monday, put the total payout so far at $15.91 billion, but some claims for 2012 are still pending. Even so, last year’s loss represents at least a 47 percent increase from the $10.8 billion record loss in 2011. Taxpayers will pick up most of the cost. The program run by the Risk Management Agency in the US Department of Agriculture is a three-way venture in which insurance companies sell farmers policies to cover crop losses. The government subsidizes the program by paying about 62 percent of the cost of insurance premiums and farmers pay about 38 percent.

When losses exceed premiums, the government ends up picking up most of that cost too, said Bruce Babcock, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University. He estimated that between premium subsidies, crop loss payments and administrative costs, US taxpayers will end up paying about $11 billion for 2012.

That’s too much, he said. “I believe farmers need the opportunities to have all the tools they could possibly use to manage their risks,” Babcock said. “I just don’t

think they need to be bribed to do so with such high degree of subsidies.” Some agriculture economists think the federal government should set up an emergency fund that sets aside a certain amount of money, perhaps $3 billion a year, to cover unusual disasters.

But crop insurers still say their program is a better bet because approval of emergency aid isn’t always certain and crop insurance pays faster. That “stabilizes the supply chain quite a bit” because banks and other companies know farmers will be able to make loan payments and pay their bills even in bad years, said Tom Zacharias, president of National Crop Insurance Services, the nonprofit trade group for insurers that sell policies to farmers. A similar debate is being heard in Congress, where Republican Sens. Jeff Flake, of Arizona, and John Duncan, of Tennessee, introduced bills early this month bills to reduce the premium subsidy to pre2000 levels. Flake said the proposals will save about $40.1 billion over 10 years by cutting the government’s portion of insurance premiums to 37 percent from the current 62 percent.

Congress had increased the subsidy to boost participation in the program - a move that was successful in raising the number of insured acres from 215 million acres in 2002 to 282 million acres last year. “The current

US fiscal crisis makes a strong argument for a common sense roll back of crop insurance subsidies,” Flake said in a statement.

But Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, another Republican, said it’s better for farmers to buy crop insurance than to go to the federal government for disaster aid every time there’s a significant drought or flood.

“It’s either going to be disaster assistance or its going to be crop insurance,” he said. “Isn’t it better for the government to promote risk management and have the farmer plan ahead and probably pay out a lot less taxpayer dollars than you have with disaster assistance?”

In central Illinois near Auburn, Mark Reichert was grateful for crop insurance after his 520 acres of corn produced only one-half to two-thirds of their normal yield during the drought. Reichert, 52, had enough insurance to cover 90 percent of his losses.

He paid $46 to $50 an acre in premiums last year and expects to buy the same amount of protection at about the same cost this year. He said it essentially allows farmers to go on to farm another year and assures banks holding farm loans that there’s consistent revenue to make payments. “It’s not meant to be a cash cow,” he said of the insurance. “It has performed exactly the way it was meant to perform.” — AP

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

BUSINESS Ernst & Young report

Online rivals push price competition

By Nadeem Shafi

I

n continuation of sharing our thought leadership material with you, this week we look at “Cost Competitiveness” and some of the risks surrounding business these days. Our research suggests that companies are increasingly accepting the fact that the length of the economic downturn is fundamentally uncertain. Businesses are putting significant efforts into cutting both costs and prices in order to compete in shrunken mature markets and highly competitive rapid-growth markets. Mature markets nearing saturation have led to fierce price competition, with little or no organic growth expected. Such problems are exacerbated by the strength of both low-cost competition and online rivals, which have made brand-driven price premiums hard to sustain.

Alongside this, high wages and input costs, as well as significant new regulatory burdens on various sectors, mean that the pressure on pricing will impact profit unless companies take firm action. Unsurprisingly, therefore, cost cutting and the related pressure on profits is cited by respondents as the second-biggest risk they face. Five years into the global crisis, most of the simple cuts to costs have already been made. That is now pushing businesses to make tough decisions on how to cut costs without damaging product and service standards.

Firms are using technology to improve productivity, introducing more flexible working practices and re-engineering supply chains to encourage growth in emerging markets. A flexible company can innovate to reach new customers, unlocking niches in mature markets and market share in emerging ones. If companies adapt to today’s volatile and, in some cases, depressed markets they can find new ways to flourish.

Five years in to the global economic crisis, companies are facing up to two big things. First, that they cannot just sit back and wait for mature markets to recover; no one knows how long this downturn will last. And second, that volatility - in national economies, currencies, global commodity prices and other things - is now a fact of business life. To succeed, companies must plan around these things. With oil prices remaining high and continued volatility in currency markets, such risks present immediate challenges to the bottom line. The need for a flexible cost structure, price regime and business model capable of operating profitably in a constantly changing world is now imperative.

Fierce competition in markets nearing saturation, particularly in the mature world, means that pricing pressure is high and organic growth slow or non-existent. Therefore, the only way to expand in some existing markets is to gain market share from competitors through mergers and acquisitions (M&A).

However, M&A in response to downward pricing pressure only makes sense if the market outlook is strong, and appropriately priced funding is available. If that is the case, then companies can gain pricing power through M&A, escaping the downward pricing pressure.

That is not the situation today, and M&A activity is slight. The number of M&A deals worldwide fell sharply in the first half of 2012, according to Thomson Reuters. A lack of confidence in the future business environment and the inability to enact the highly leveraged debt-based deals commonplace before the global financial crisis of 2008 are key drivers for this trend. M&A activity in mature economies is also likely to be driven more by industrial logic than financial engineering.

Conversely, in the oil and gas sector, strategic divestitures seem set to increase over the next two years. Companies are now thinking hard about their business models, and realize they cannot be present in all countries in all activities. This is having a restructuring effect on the global energy market.

Cost-cutting Five years into the global economic crisis, many of the obvious cost-cutting measures have already been taken. That poses a critical risk to firms, with cost cutting and profit pressure ranked second overall for the second year in succession. The quick wins have been made and that means firms face the need for deeper cuts, without damaging company performance. These pressures have intensified in recent years, reflecting the narrower margin that firms can absorb and still remain operational. Costs do need to be crunched, though. Outside pressures such as inflation will drive up wages and input costs, and cut margins.

Some of the most robust functions and programs are clearly under pressure; the question is whether they should be sustained or cut out completely? Other mitigating measures include a serious reconfiguration of the supply chain to create cost competitiveness. This can include testing supply chains against customs duties and fuel price sensitivities, as well as developing mixed far-shore, near-shore and onshore sourcing and production to generate cost savings.

Is the worst behind us?

Cost cutting and profit pressure are pushed in large part by market risks, including commodity price volatility, interest and exchange rates, and equity risk. Such market volatility was named as the third-biggest risk facing companies. Commodity price volatility developed rapidly but the worst impact on companies and performance could be behind us. It is widely expected that oil prices to moderate at around $100-$120 per barrel in 2013 and that metal markets to deliver stronger performance in 2013.

However, the absolute price of some commodities, including oil and gas, remains high, feeding price pressure and impacting location and distribution decisions.

Interest-rate volatility remains a key risk, too. With global growth slowing, governments’ willingness to implement fiscal expansion is limited. The burden on monetary policy is particularly severe, but in many mature countries policy interest rates are already at or near zero. A heated debate is brewing on the extent to which the developed world’s low-employment, low-growth economies suffer from a structural problem or a straightforward lack of aggregate demand. If the latter hypothesis wins favor, a much more activist monetary policy approach from the largest Organization for Economic and Co-Operation and Development (OECD) central banks is likely.

In some regions, the risk profile has increased over the past two years. The political upheaval of 2011 and 2012 in the Middle East further increased the region’s risk profile; accordingly, political and social risk is ranked second in Ernst & Young’s MENA risk list.

Extreme political pressure could heighten the need for companies to respond to their stakeholders or even affect a company’s wider reputation. I think the level of regulation will dramatically increase as regulators become much more aggressive. This will also be the case in countries where you do not expect it, particularly rapidgrowth markets. A big downside risk here is that authorities in rapid growth markets may not be as well prepared as those in developed markets. I wish you all a safe and happy week.

Nadeem Shafi is Partner Assurance, Ernst & Young.

Smaller US airports ready to do without control tower Closures could help meet $637m budget cut SALISBURY, Maryland: The small airport in this town near Maryland’s Atlantic coast is among 149 about to lose its control tower, but local officials are confident flights can go on safely without it. The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) says the closures will help it meet a $637 million budget reduction mandated after President Barack Obama and Congress failed to agree on how to slash the US deficit.

“We heard from communities across the country about the importance of their towers and these were very tough decisions,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in a statement.

“Unfortunately, we are faced with a series of difficult choices that we have to make to reach the required cuts under sequestration.” One of the airports losing its control tower is Salisbury-Ocean City Wicomico Regional Airport, which handles an average of 145 takeoffs and landings a day by commuter flights, military aircraft and private planes.

In 1999, the local authority invested $640,000 on the tower at the dual-runaway airport that serves Ocean City, a MidAtlantic seaside resort town. The airport will remain open, as pilots can come and go by self-announcing their intentions between each other on common radio frequenciesstandard procedure at small airports that never had towers.

But with its mix of fast and slow traffic, the tower at Salisbury represented an important margin of safety to prevent not only mid-air collisions, but also mishaps on the tarmac. “Our opinion is that the tower creates an environment which is certainly more safe than having an environment without the control tower,” airport manager Robert Bryant told AFP. “But then again, the burden of ensuring that the environment is safe suddenly becomes the responsibility of the pilots.” Piedmont Airlines, a regional unit

of US Airways, intends to keep serving the airport “as long as they can sell airline tickets and Salisbury remains a profitable destination for them,” Bryant said. The airports losing their control towers all have one thing in common-the towers are manned by personnel employed by private contractors for the FAA, rather than for the federal agency itself. Many are served by commuter airlines that ferry travelers to bigger airline hubs for onward long-distance journeys. In total, the United States has 515 airports with control towers — 264 operated by the FAA and 251 by contractors. Forty-nine of the former face closure later this year, subject to negotiations with labor unions.

“In smaller airports, where there are just a couple of Cessnas a day, they can get away with not having a tower,” said one Salisbury controller, referring popular light aircraft.

“When you have passengers, military, fast traffic, you really need a tower, an extra set of eyes,” he added, declining to provide his full name.

The inability of Obama and Congress to agree on deficit reduction measures triggered the so-called “sequester,” which requires the US government to slice $85 billion from its spending over the seven months that began in March. The FAA and commercial airlines have previously warned that the tower closures, which begin on April 7, could slow air traffic around the United States, especially during the busy summer season. By shutting down control towers, the FAA is compromising the safety of American skies, said Craig Fuller, president of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, which represents non-commercial and non-military flyers.

But he added: “Despite these cuts, pilots in the United States are highly-trained and extremely conscientious... They are wellaccustomed to flying at (non-tower) facilities and will proceed accordingly.” — AFP

The air traffic control tower is seen at Southern Illinois Airport in Murphysboro.—AP

WASHINGTON: A helicopter flies near the control tower at the Olympia Regional Airport on Friday. This tower is one of 149 towers that the Federal Aviation Administration will close at starting early next month under orders to trim hundreds of millions of dollars from its budget. — AP

PepsiCo says it’s not hungry for a big snack deal NEW YORK: PepsiCo Inc says it isn’t interested in any big acquisitions after a report suggested a mega-snack food deal could bring its Doritos under the same roof as Oreos.

The Purchase, New York, company, which dominates the salty snack market with Frito-Lay, issued a short statement Friday after the Telegraph of London said activist investor Nelson Peltz could push it to merge with Mondelez, which is known for sweets including Cadbury and Nabisco.

The report cited unnamed sources saying Peltz, who is known for making big investments then forcing change, has been building stakes in the two companies in recent weeks.

PepsiCo has long been the subject of speculation that it would spin off its underperforming beverage business.

CEO Indra Nooyi tried to squash such talk last year with a “Power of One” marketing campaign that featured the company’s sodas alongside its chips.

But PepsiCo has nevertheless been reviewing options to restructure its North American beverage business and recently said it would provide more thoughts on the matter early next year.

In particular, the company said it wanted to see how a new sweetener system it’s developing might help improve its soda business. “We certainly wouldn’t want to make a change in the business structure while there’s still opportunities to unlock value that might be better unlocked while PepsiCo still owns the business,” Chief Financial Officer Hugh Johnston said in a call with reporters in February.

Consumer Edge Research CEO Bill Pecoriello noted that the global snack business is much more attractive to PepsiCo than the soda business, which has been declining for years in devel-

oped markets such as the US. But if PepsiCo were to spin off its beverage business, he said it would likely want to make a major acquisition to remain as big as it is today. In fact, Consumer Edge issued a report just this week detailing how a merged PepsiCo and Mondelez would work in markets around the world. The report found that the combined company would benefit because there are many regions where one of the companies has a big presence and the other doesn’t. In places such as the US where both do big business, Pecoriello said consolidating distribution networks could result in cost savings of $3.4 billion. He also noted that PepsiCo spinning off its beverage business wouldn’t necessarily negate the “Power of One” strategy because independent companies could maintain marketing partnerships. For instance, PepsiCo still provides beverages for the fast-food chains owned by Yum Brands Inc., which it spun off in 1997. Still, the deal would present plenty of challenges. JP Morgan analyst Ken Goldman noted that Mondelez has an array of products that could be too complicated “to appeal to a larger suitor.” He also noted that the size of the company could raise antitrust issues.

At the same time, Goldman said he wouldn’t take any potential interest by Peltz lightly. In a short statement, PepsiCo said that it doesn’t comment on market rumor or speculation.

“As we’ve said before, we are making strong progress in our strategy to deliver long-term growth and create shareholder value,” it said. Mondelez International Inc, which split from Kraft Foods Group Inc. last year, also said it was satisfied with its portfolio as it stands. — AP

Stocks rise on Wall St aided by earnings NEW YORK: Strong company earnings boosted stocks on Wall Street Friday.

Investors also saw a chance to add to their holdings after declines earlier in the week. Nike reported a surge in profit, sending its stock price to a record.

Tiffany topped earnings predictions, boosted by demand from customers in Asia. A strong run-up in stocks this year is encouraging investors to buy whenever the market dips, says Ron Florance, managing director of investment strategy at Wells Fargo Private Bank. “ We still have an astonishing amount of money sitting on the sidelines,” says Florance. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 90.54 points, or 0.6 percent, to 14,512.03 Friday. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index rose 11.09 points, or 0.7 percent, to 1,556.89. The Nasdaq composite gained 22.40 points, or 0.7 percent, to 3,245. Nike’s stock hit an all-time high, rising 11 percent to $59.53 after the company reported a spike in quarterly profit. Tiffany’s stock rose nearly 2 percent to $69.23 after it reported strong earnings. Despite Friday’s gains, the S&P 500 was down for the week, falling seven points, or 0.3 percent. The index was weighed down by another debt crisis in Europe and disappointing corporate news.

The Dow had its worst week in more than a month, shedding a fraction of a percentage point. The markets got hit on several fronts. The Mediterranean island nation of Cyprus, a banking haven, struggled to devise a plan to avoid financial collapse. Oracle reported weak sales. FedEx, a bellwether for

the economy, posted a drop in quarterly profit and cut its annual earnings forecast.

As a result, the S&P 500 logged only

its second weekly decline of the year.

The first came the week of Feb. 22, when investors were spooked by the minutes from a Federal Reserve policy

NEW YORK: Trader Richard Scardino, right, uses his handheld device as he works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. World markets were lower on Friday because of uncertainty over the restructuring of troubled banks in Cyprus. —AP

meeting. The minutes revealed disagreement over how long to keep buying bonds in an effort to boost the economy. A pause in the stock market run-up is due, says Terry Sandven, chief equity strategist at US Bank Wealth Management. Gains this year overstate the improvement in the economy, he says. The biggest risk to the market run-up will come when the Fed faces increasing pressure to end its stimulus program. That could happened if the economy continues to improve and stock markets rise, says Sandven.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose to 1.93 percent from 1.92 percent. Among other stocks making big moves Friday; Micron Technology rose 97 cents, or 10.7 percent, to $10.05 despite reporting a loss in its fiscal second-quarter later Thursday. The chipmaker said that revenue grew 3 percent, to $2.08 billion, better than analysts had expected.

Anacor Pharmaceuticals Inc. climbed $1.24, or 25.6 percent, to $6.08 Friday, after the drug developer reported strong data from a mid-stage study of a potential chronic rash treatment.

Marin Software, a marketing software company, rose $2.26, or 16.1 percent, to $16.26 on its market debut. The San Francisco-based company raised $105 million in its initial public offering. AK Steel Holding fell 16 cents, or 4.6 percent, to $3.31, after projecting a largerthan-expected first-quarter loss because a previously expected seasonal increase in demand for steel hasn’t materialized. — AP

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

BUSINESS

Hyundai unveils images of its new sports coupe concept HND-9 More details to be revealed at 2013 Seoul Motor Show SEOUL: Hyundai Motor Company, the fastestgrowing automaker by brand, yesterday unveiled exterior renderings of the ‘HND-9’, its latest luxury sports coupe concept. The ‘HND-9’ represents an evolution of Hyundai’s fluidic sculpture design philosophy. The ninth concept model developed

by Hyundai Motor Group’s R&D Center in Namyang, Korea, the HND-9 features sophisticated details in every design element, reinforcing a premium look.

In particular, the HND-9, with its dramatic long

hood and wheelbase, is a modern reinterpretation of the elegant image of a classic premium sports coupe.

Fluidic yet sleek character lines that stretch from headlamp to trunk, voluminous, powerful car body and a striking, wide hexagonal-shaped radiator grille underscore the high performance image of the concept. Furthermore, butterfly doors, spiral-shaped lines connected to the headlamp, softly glistening silver coating, dual twin muffler and uniquely designed head and rear

lamps give the car a sleek futuristic look.

As a rear-wheel drive, high-performance sports coupe concept, HND-9 is equipped with 3.3-liter turbo GDi engine and 8-speed auto transmission, delivering maximum output of 370ps.

The HND-9 is set to make its world debut during Hyundai’s press conference on March 28 at the 2013 Seoul Motor Show. More details of the concept’s design and its cutting-edge technologies will be revealed at the show.

Established in 1967, Hyundai Motor Co has

grown into the Hyundai Motor Group, with more than two dozen auto-related subsidiaries and affiliates. Hyundai Motor-which has seven manufacturing bases outside of South Korea including Brazil, China, the Czech Republic, India, Russia, Turkey and the US-sold 4.4 million vehicles globally in 2012. Hyundai Motor, which employs over 80,000 worldwide, offers a full line-up of products including small to large passenger vehicles, SUVs and commercial vehicles.

Hyundai Motor’s Middle East headquarters are

located in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and are run by Managing Director for the Middle East, Tom Lee. Hyundai’s retail network in the GCC and Levant consists of: Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, KSA: Dammam, Jeddah and Riyadh; UAE, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Hyundai recorded its best ever sales across the whole Middle East region in 2012, selling 305,800 vehicles, an increase of 7.7%.

The year also saw to another landmark figure, as the Korean manufacturer sold its two millionth car in the region since it began exports in 1976.

Bridgestone partners with Red Bull Car Park Drift

Ghaith Al-Ghaith, CEO flydubai and Jeyhun Efendi, Head of Commercial Operations, flydubai at MITT.

flydubai doubles Russia, Ukraine network Network reaches more than 60 destinations KUWAIT: flydubai, Dubai’s innovative airline, yesterday underscored the growing importance of the CIS region to its operations by announcing it will double its network in Russia to eight points and add additional services in Ukraine.

In Russia, the carrier will launch flights to Mineralnye Vody on 16 April 2013 followed

by Rostov-on-Don and Volgograd on 13 September 2013. Operations to Krasnodar, meanwhile, will commence a week later on 20 September 2013. flydubai offers the only year-round direct scheduled services to these cities, which are all located in South West Russia.

The route map in Ukraine, meanwhile, will also expand to include the only direct services from Dubai to the Black Sea resort of Odessa as well as Dnepropetrovsk in the east of the country. Flights to Odessa will begin on 15 September 2013, the same day the carrier adds capacity to the capital, Kiev, to which it will fly double daily. Services to Dnepropetrovsk will begin on 18 September 2013. These additional operations bring flydubai’s network to 18 points in the CIS region - more than any other Middle East carrier.

Speaking at a press conference held during the annual Moscow International Travel & Tourism Exhibition (MITT), flydubai’s CEO, Ghaith Al Ghaith, said: “Russia and Ukraine are two of flydubai’s key markets. We have seen steady passenger growth over the past couple of years in both countries. Not only is Dubai a popular destination, but we are seeing more and more passengers connecting on to flydubai’s services to Sri Lanka and the Maldives. Our strategy of targeting regional airports has been a significant factor in our

growth in the region and with the announcements of these six new routes today, a greater number of people will be able to visit the UAE and beyond with our affordable direct flights.” flydubai has already announced six new routes this year in addition today’s six, increasing its network to more than 60 destinations across the Middle East, Africa, the Indian Subcontinent, Asia, CIS and Central & Eastern Europe.

Since flydubai started flights to Russia in October 2010, it has seen phenomenal growth. In 2012, the airline carried 73% more passengers than the previous 12 months on its existing four routes to Kazan, Samara Ufa and Yekaterinburg. There was also an 86% increase in flights over the same period.

Kazan, meanwhile, experienced the highest growth with 622% more flights and a 561% rise in passengers last year compared to 2011.

September is a popular month in the CIS for flydubai. Not only will most of the new destinations begin in September 2013, but it also marks the anniversary of operations to the carrier’s existing Ukraine destinations of Kiev, Kharkiv and Donetsk, as well as Kazan and Ufa in Russia.

In the 18 months flydubai has operated flights to Ukraine, the airline’s passengers have increased 348%. Of the combined traffic from Kiev, Kharkiv and Donetsk, 19% of people connect to Colombo via flydubai’s hub in Dubai.

Krasnodar, Rostov-on Don and Volgograd are located in the Southern Federal District of Russia. While Krasnodor is a key economic and tourist centre, Rostov-on-Don and Volgograd are important trading cities due to

their positions on or close to waterways.

Mineralnye Vody, meanwhile, lies in the North Caucasian Federal District and is well known in the region for its mineral waters and health spas.

Odessa, often referred to as “The Pearl of the Black Sea”, is a popular holiday resort, thanks to its mix of beaches, scenic old town and the 200-step Potemkin Stairs, which serve as the gateway to the city from the sea.

Dnepropetrovsk, meanwhile, is Ukraine’s fourth largest city and a key industrial area.

Flight Details Russia Flights between Dubai and Mineralnye Vody, Volgograd, Rostov-on-Don and Krasnodar will all operate on Tuesdays and Fridays, with the return flights back to Dubai departing the destinations on Wednesdays and Saturdays. The timings are as follows: Dubai - Mineralnye Vody: Flight FZ977 departs at 2330hrs landing at 0310hrs local time Mineralnye Vody - Dubai: FZ978 departs at 0410hrs arriving in Dubai at 0735hrs local time Dubai - Rostov-on-Don: Flight FZ981 departs at 2310hrs, landing at 0330hrs local time Rostov-on-Don - Dubai: FZ982 takes off at 0430hrs, arriving in Dubai at 0840hrs local time Dubai - Volgograd: Flight FZ975 leaves at 2250hrs, arriving at 0300hrs local time Volgograd - Dubai: FZ976 departs at 0400hrs, landing in Dubai at 0805hrs local time Dubai - Krasnodar: Flight FZ983 departs

Terminal 2 at 2340hrs, arriving at 0350hrs local time Krasnodar - Dubai: FZ984 takes off at 0450hrs, landing back in Dubai at 0845hrs local time Ukraine Flights between Dubai and Odessa will operate on Tuesdays and Fridays at the following times: Dubai - Odessa: FZ723 departs at 1000 landing at 1355 local time Odessa - Dubai: Flight FZ724 departs at 1455 arriving in Dubai at 2020 local time Flights between Dubai and Dnepropetrovsk will operate on Wednesdays and Saturdays at the following times: Dubai - Dnepropetrovsk: FZ737 departs at 1025 landing at 1410 local time Dnepropetrovsk - Dubai: Flight FZ738 departs at 1515 arriving in Dubai at 2045 local Fares are inclusive of all taxes, 20kg checked baggage, one piece of hand luggage weighing up to 7kg and one small laptop bag or handbag. A seat with extra legroom costs KD 8. Once on board, passengers can choose from a range of optional extras, including in-flight entertainment packages priced from 800 fils or select from the varied menu of refreshments and Duty Free items.

Flights can be purchased from flydubai’s website (flydubai.com), its Call Centre in the UAE (+9714 231 1000), as well as through travel partners and flydubai Travel Shops in the UAE. Further information and details of the carrier’s car rental and travel insurance services can also be found on flydubai.com.

DUBAI: Bridgestone Middle East and Africa (BSMEA) announced its partnership with Red Bull for this year’s Red Bull Car Park Drift. Bridgestone Middle East and Africa (BSMEA) are now official sponsors of the drift tournament, and will supply Red Bull athlete AbdoFeghali with Bridgestone tyres during his races and demonstrations.

“We are really excited to be sponsoring the Red Bull Car Park Drift as it was one of the best platforms to connect with consumers in thrilling environment,” said Daisuke Hotta, General Manager - Consumer Tire Marketing, Bridgestone MEA. “ The sponsorship couldn’t have come at a better time, as we recently witnessed AbdoFeghali obliterate the world record for longest vehicle drift using Bridgestone tyres. We would also like to wish all the qualifiers the best of luck as they take to the tracks to battle it out in true drift style, and look forward to meeting the next drift king.”

Feghali doubled the previous Guinness World Record by continuously drifting 11,180 meters, which took 14 minutes and 18 seconds to drift 43 laps around a custom track at YAS Marina Circuit in Abu Dhabi. The 2013 series will start with two qualifiers and a final in the UAE will kick off the series.

Then, six qualifiers and a final in KSA along with events in Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and Oman will determine which drifters are worthy of competing in the energy-intense regional final and represent their nations in a quest to discover the next King of Drift.

And for the first time ever to increase the competition, the Red Bull Car Park Drift regional final will feature a Double Drift Nations Cup. To top it up, judging will take on a whole new level with a state-ofthe-art app to mark each drifter’s performance in speed traps, clipping points, car appearance, crowd reaction, and tire smoke.

The sponsorship also follows Bridgestone recent announcement as the Official Tyre of Dubai International Motor Show 2013 which will take place from 5th till 9th November at the Dubai World Trade Centre.

About Bridgestone Corporation: Bridgestone Corporation, headquartered in Tokyo, is the world’s largest tyre and rubber company. In addition to tyres for use in a wide variety of applications, it manufactures a broad range of diversified products, which include industrial rubber and chemical products and sporting goods.

‘Homes of India’ exhibition in first week of April KUWAIT: Homes of India, a mega Indian property exhibition showcasing real estate from across India, will take place on Friday and Saturday, April 5 and 6, 2013, at the Ramada Hotel in Riggae. Over two dozen reputed and reliable builders and property developers will be participating in the exhibition and offering

their portfolio of properties from various states in India.

In addition to the variety of locations around India, the Homes of India exhibition offers properties targeting different income groups. The exhibition features properties that suit every budget and lifestyle, ranging from

affordable apartments to high-end luxury villas will be showcased at the two-day exhibition.

The exhibition is an excellent chance for potential real estate investors and home buyers to look at various options and locations without having to travel to different places around India. The presence of a large Indian population

from all over India in Kuwait also makes Homes of India exhibition an ideal vehicle and attractive option for realtors having property developments across India, as they can target diverse segments of Indians from different regions of the country.

Homes of India exhibition is being organized by Studioline Conventions & Estates, a leading events management company in India, in association with Response Events & Exhibitions, Kuwait. “The Homes of India exhibition is an opportunity for NRIs in Kuwait to explore and evaluate the vast choices and competitive prices available in Indian realestate under one roof,” said Michael Vasanth of Studioline.

In addition to foreign direct investment in Indian properties there is also a seemingly insatiable local demand, which is fueling steady price increases all over India. And to keep up with this momentum, real estate developers are moving out into newer areas, building a wide range of properties with features and amenities to suit all budgets. For its part, the Indian government is also investing large amounts of money in infrastructure development that create more jobs, which

directly or indirectly fuels real-estate growth.

“Property has always given better returns than most other investments. As the value of gold continues to go lower, investors are losing their appetite for the precious metal and as fixed deposit rates from banks are chipped away by inflation, real-estate in India is once

again regaining its luster as one of the most rewarding investment opportunities. Now is probably the best time for the Indian community in Kuwait to look at investing in realestate market, as it sits poised to surge ahead in the days and months ahead,” added Vasanth.

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

technology

Senate shows support for Internet sales taxes WASHINGTON: Advocates of an effort to help states collect taxes on Internet sales won a symbolic but important victory Friday as the Senate signaled solid bipartisan support for the proposal.

Senators voted 75-24 for a nonbinding measure that endorses giving states more power to collect existing sales taxes on purchases their residents make from out-of-state Internet companies.

Though the vote was merely a show of sentiment, the one-sided outcome showed that supporters of collecting the levies could prevail should

the Senate consider binding legislation later this year. A congressional battle over the issue has been simmering for years, pitting Internet companies against traditional retail stores.

Part of what is at stake is potential revenue for cash-starved state governments across the country.

An estimated $20 billion in sales taxes go uncollected annually by out-of-state online merchants.

Supporters also argue that not collecting the levies is a competitive disadvantage for retail stores, which must collect local sales taxes.

One sponsor, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said Internet sales taxes should be collected “so those local businesses will have a fighting chance.”

Sens. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., and Lamar Alexander, RTenn., were other chief sponsors.

Opponents said the plan would be unworkably complicated, would pressure states without sales taxes to adopt them and would encourage companies to move overseas, where they said sales taxes could not be enforced. “It tramples on states’ rights,” said Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H.

Online businesses with less than $1 million in annual sales would be exempted from having to collect the levies.

In states with sales taxes, online buyers are currently supposed to pay a tax on their purchases but the requirement is seldom enforced.

Twenty-six Republicans voted to endorse collecting Internet sales taxes and 19 Republicans voted against it. Democrats backed the proposal, 49-5.

Friday’s vote was on an amendment to the 2014 budget the Senate was debating. — AFP

Africans turn to technology to tame the traffic beast Streets undersized, under-maintained

PARIS: Japanese engineer Yasushi Matoba puts his hands on water projecting lights as on a screen on March 20, 2013 during the 15th edition of Laval Virtual, an international meeting on vitual reality and converging technologies, in Laval, western France. The latest technology and the most innovative applications in the field of virtual reality, augmented reality, 3D real time, will be exhibited at the Framework in Laval until March 24. — AFP

Can tchnology end poverty?

NEW YORK: If you believe the hype, technology is going to help us end global poverty.

Advances have indeed made a huge difference in the lives of the poor, but there’s also a healthy amount of skepticism out there. Berkeley researcher Kentaro Toyama has a blog dedicated to calling out naÔve or inappropriate uses of information and communication technologies (ICT). Calling himself the ICT4D jester (using the development jargon for “information and communication technologies for development”), he has no shortage of material. We’ve all heard stories of computers that sit unused in African classrooms; on a recent post, the jester takes aim at texting cows.

The organization I’m part of, BRAC, is known for going to scale with solutions that are often radically low-tech. We’re more likely to scale up birthing kits that cost less than 50 cents apiece than mobile apps that might diagnose disease; more likely to open one-room schools in rented spaces or even boats, where children sit on the floor and learn to think creatively, than insist that every pupil have Internet access.

But I’m hardly a naysayer when it comes to tech. I agree with Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, who write in Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think that higher productivity associated with the falling cost of technology is leading us to a world of plenty.

The trick is making sure everyone shares in the coming abundance - or at least has a fair shot at doing so. To do that, it’s vital that technology be suitable and relevant to the lives of its users. That’s easier said than done in a world where most product innovations are geared toward the rich.

We can take some lessons from Bangladesh, where BRAC is heading full steam into mobile banking with bKash (bikash means “growth” in Bengali), which is now the largest mobile banking provider in the country. BRAC Bank (the commercial bank owned by BRAC) launched the service as a pilot in five branches in November 2011, asking small enterprise borrowers to make repayments via local agents who would send a receipt via text message rather than in person at branch offices.

Even though it was designed to save time for hard-working families, asking borrowers to forego their passbooks in favor of SMS confirmations made them extremely uncomfortable.

Shameran Abed, who runs BRAC’s microfinance program, explains what happened: “In the first couple months, a lot of our borrowers would send the money through their mobile phones and then physically show up at the branch to

check with the accountant that the money had turned up.”

You may chuckle at that, but consider things from the point of view of a Bangladeshi smallholder farmer. “In a country where most people think that the only thing that is irrefutable is hard copy documentation with someone’s signature affixed to it, we were asking our borrowers to take a major leap of faith,” Abed says.

“Some of them said to us: ‘If ever there is a dispute and we end up in court, no magistrate or judge will want to see an SMS confirmation.

They’ll want to see proof” - meaning a hardcopy passbook.” BKash is now advertised widely, with 30,000 agents and 2.2 million users. We’re confident in the cautious approach we’ve taken, and more importantly, the clients seem so, too.

But what happens when you ask customers to make a leap of faith and the chasm proves too wide? The consequences can be harmful often more so for poorer clients than the ones pushing the solution.

BRAC learned this lesson from its foray into community-owned tube wells and irrigation pumps in the 1990s, documented in Ian Smillie’s Freedom From Want. Since water deep in the ground doesn’t belong to anybody, we thought of giving loans to organizations of the landless poor to drill and manage deep tube wells and sell the water to rice farmers, who would in turn benefit from higher yields.

The promise was exciting - the details far less so. The project depended on sufficient demand from farmers, which depended on ensuring they had access to high-yield seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides. It also meant gauging demand for irrigation with a certain level of precision, which meant accurately forecasting the sale price of rice.

In the end, the program had far too many moving parts over which BRAC and the borrowers had insufficient control. At the program’s peak, 700 pumps covered 27,000 acres, with the loans constituting 9% of BRAC’s total microfinance portfolio. By the end of 1993, half of the pumps were operating at a loss and many loans were in arrears. The program was shut down in 1996, and although it refunded 100% of the loan repayments, it went down as one of BRAC’s biggest failures. If details about fertilizers and crop yields seem tedious, that’s part of my point. We need to learn to hang onto the positive energy of the tech-innovation movement in the words of Steve Jobs, stay hungry and foolish - even when the complexities don’t exactly liven up our cocktail party chatter (or, for that matter, galvanize investors).—MCT

ACCRA: If you own a mobile phone and spend sunup to sundown watching the traffic pass in Ghana’s capital, then Iddrisu Mohammed wants you to be his spy. With an iPad in his hands and two phones in his pants pockets, Mohammed crisscrosses Accra on foot, looking for people to become informants for Jamless, a recently launched traffic information service that hopes to restore a little sanity to the capital’s hectic commute.

“What Jamless will do is give you the traffic situation in any part of Accra that you are and give you alternate routes to use if the place is jammed,” said Mohammed, who is the company’s informant manager. “You don’t want to get to work late. You don’t want to get home late. If you’re on Jamless you know the alternative route to use to get home early.” West Africa’s population has been booming, and in many cases infrastructure has failed to keep up, leaving residents of crowded big cities to grapple with impossibly congested commutes.

But a number of clever entrepreneurs and frustrated commuters have turned to social media and other technology to help drivers defy the “go-slows” that start and end the work day for many. In Nigeria’s mega-city Lagos, GidiTraffic and its over 50,000 Twitter followers keep a running log of commute catastrophes in the metropolis of some 15 million people legendary for its hours-long slogs.

And in Abidjan, commuters can send traffic information by text, Twitter or Facebook to CivRoute, a website that offers traffic conditions for Ivory Coast’s main city. The services are sorely needed as cars proliferate in these growing west African countries.

In Ghana, home to a booming economy based on exports of gold, cocoa and oil, the number of

vehicles per thousand people went from 21 in 2003 to 30 in 2009, according to World Bank statistics.

But streets in cities like Accra are often undersized, under-maintained, or both. Harried commuters in the capital spare no road, be it a leafy residential street, an unfinished dirt track or a four-lane highway, in the quest to get to their home or office faster. Before Jamless “people usually got traffic through friends, through the newspapers and usually on radio,” Mohammed said. But none of those offer real-time updates as Jamless does. Jamless was started by Guillaume Boniface, a former marketing professional for a French telecommunications company in Guinea’s capital Conakry. His experience of traffic there was an all-day malaise of stationary cars, something he saw repeated when he went around the region. “Living in Guinea, I had this idea. All African cities had this traffic issue,” Boniface said, recalling traffic jams that would often degenerate into arguments between truculent drivers until the police came to break it up.

“Ghana seemed an easier country to start up.”

As the company’s chief executive officer, Boniface spends his time working with the country’s mobile phone carriers and putting together Jamless’s website in preparation for its launch in the coming months. Jamless started small, with just a Twitter feed with a few hundred followers, through which Mohammed posts informants’ tips and entreats followers for details on underserved routes.

They now offer commuters traffic updates on major routes by text message and also provide a map of the city’s traffic, but they haven’t started advertising those services yet, Boniface said.

March Madness online not for cord-cutters

Japan to offer bullet train technology to Taiwan TOKYO: Central Japan Railway Co. plans to provide Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp. with technology for the running of its bullet train operations, including earthquake response measures, it was reported yesterday. The companies will sign a contract within several months, Kyodo News said, quoting sources close to the matter.

Central Japan Railway is considering giving the Taiwanese firm its know-how on disaster control as well as maintenance and inspection

of train cars, tracks and signals, Kyodo said.

Japanese train firms, facing the risk of massive earthquakes, have introduced cutting-edge systems to automatically control operations in case of major jolts. It will be the first time for the Japanese company to strike such a deal with a railway company overseas, it said.

Taiwan has been using bullet trains based on a Japanese model, marking Japan’s first successful export of its high-speed trains. —- AFP

The problem with our data obsession CALIFORNIA: A contentious question on the California ballot in 2008 inspired a simple online innovation: a website called Eightmaps.com. The number in the name referred to Proposition 8, which called for the state’s constitution to be amended to prohibit gay marriage. Under California’s campaign finance laws, all donations greater than $100 to groups advocating for or against Proposition 8 were recorded in a publicly accessible database. Someone (it’s still not clear who) took all the data about the proposition’s supporters-their names and zip codes, and their employers in some cases-and plotted it on a Google map.

After finding themselves on the map, several supporters of the gay-marriage ban said they were harassed or their businesses were boycotted. This unsettled even some opponents of Proposition 8; surely it wouldn’t be long, they said, before, say, religious fundamentalists created a similar tool to call out supporters of a gay-rights measure. The committee that had backed Proposition 8 asked a federal judge to strike down the disclosure law or raise its threshold beyond $100 so that more people could give anonymously. But he refused, arguing that ballot measures need the “sunshine” that donation disclosure provides. His ruling was aligned with the idea that as much data as possible about the political process should be revealed.

Mobile phones are ubiquitous in Ghana, so Jamless relies on small-scale traders who ply Accra’s streets for a constant stream of traffic updates, sent in by text.

“If there was enough (Twitter followers), then maybe, yeah, crowd-sourcing would be enough,” Boniface said, referring to the practice of relying on followers for information. “Not enough people have a smartphone in Ghana yet.”

If an informant sends traffic information every 20 minutes, which they do by texting a combination of numbers and characters to Jamless, they can make $20 a month, sometimes more, Mohammed said.

Though most informants give accurate tips, Boniface cross-checks traffic information with other informants in the area, and sometimes calls or visits informants if they are sending wrong information.

The biggest issue, he said, is informants not understanding how to properly text Jamless’s automated system. But tipsters keep dropping out, forcing Mohammed to walk up to 20 kilometres a day in search of the right people in the right place.

“I’ll target those who are stationary,” like people who sell phone airtime or fruits on busy roadways, he said. “They’re always there, Monday to Sunday.”

On a Friday afternoon, Mohammed had walked the length of a dusty half-finished highway, meeting with informants enthusiastic and otherwise. He came across Abdul Darmenikpui, who was weaving traditional kente cloth under a thatch shelter.

“You should bring me some money,” Darmenikpui said. But the weaver hadn’t made enough entries into Jamless’s system to get a payment yet. “Please keep it up,” Mohammed asked Darmenikpui. “And don’t stop.” — AFP

Evgeny Morozov worries that we are too often making this trade-off-opting to publish more information to increase transparency even if it undermines principles such as privacy or civic involvement. In his trenchant new book, To Save Everything Click Here, Morozov, a writer for Slate and The New Republic, uses the Eightmaps episode to support his claim that “Internet-centrism” is warping our view of what’s truly important.

Transparency is ascending at the expense of other values, Morozov suggests, mainly because it is so cheap and easy to use the Internet to distribute data that might someday prove useful. And because we’re so often told that the Internet has liberated us from the controls that “gatekeepers” had on information, rethinking the availability of information seems retrograde-and the tendency toward openness gathers even more force.

(Notice that Facebook says its mission is “to make the world more open and transparent.”)

Morozov is not alone in fearing too much transparency. Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig has eloquently described why having more data about politicians is more likely to mislead people into cynicism than to make politics better. But Lessig seems resigned to the inevitability of such datagathering projects in the age of the Internet. He believes the solution is to finance elections pub-

licly, so people have less reason to be cynical about their lawmakers’ motivations.

That infuriates Morozov, because he believes Lessig is merely furthering a misconception that the Internet is like some force of nature rather than a human creation-that resistance is futile. On the contrary, Morozov says, resistance is required.

His response to the problem raised by Eightmaps is not to simply accept that more information is going to be easily searchable and change the law accordingly. Instead, we should demand that our online systems respect values beyond mere transparency. Campaign donation databases, for example, could be designed so that records cannot be sucked out of them en masse. Yes, that would inhibit some easy data discoveries. But it could enhance democracy in the long run by making people feel freer to support causes that might be unpopular in their neighborhood or their office.

Morozov’s first book, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, sought to puncture the myth that social media is a potent weapon against dictatorships. Quite the opposite, he said: savvy regimes use the Web to keep tabs on dissidents. This certainly appears to be true in China, Syria, and Iran. In his new book he is trying to deflate a more amorphous idea: “solutionism.” This is his word for the belief that with enough data

about many complex aspects of life-including not just politics but also crime, traffic, and health-we can fix problems of inefficiency. For example, predictive software now analyzes crime statistics and helps police decide where to beef up patrols.

Algorithms track website clicks and advise journalists on what kinds of stories to write. Morozov sees many ways this could go terribly wrong. For one thing, maximal efficiency is not necessarily a value to strive for; inefficiency often produces social benefits. Not knowing exactly how much readership each story got probably led newspapers to extensive coverage of state government.

But the most chilling potential problem is that the data we use to guide ourselves can be incomplete or overly reductionist. Many crimes go unreported, which could fool predictive policing software into thinking a neighborhood is safe. Cops on the beat, however, might be able to tell when things don’t seem quite right there and keep an eye out. Morozov fears a future in which such “intuitive knowledge” about how to deploy resources is overruled by algorithms that can work only with hard data and can’t, of course, account for the data they don’t have. Similarly, online records of someone’s campaign donations might seem detailed and hence instructive, but they will always offer at best a partial account of that person’s beliefs or role in the political process.—MCT

NEW YORK: Finding March Madness basketball games online is easier this year, but watching them isn’t if you’ve ditched your cable or satellite TV service. This is good news for most Americans - those who pay for cable or satellite service. If you already get the Turner channels - TNT, TBS and TruTV - on television, you should be able to watch live video of every game for free on computers and mobile devices. But last year, Turner gave those who don’t have cable or satellite - the so-called cord-cutters an option to view all 67 games online for a onetime fee of $4. So if you didn’t want to pay $70 or more each month for cable service, you could just pay $4 once for the games.

That was quite a deal. In fact, it was too good to last. Turner says the plan all along has been to eliminate that option once people got more comfortable with signing in with their pay-TV accounts to watch online. NBC and its sister cable channels have been doing that every other year with the Olympics. HBO, which like Turner is owned by Time Warner Inc., makes you sign in to watch its shows online. There’s no online-only option with either.

It’s a concept the television industry calls TV Everywhere. The catch is you still need a TV subscription to watch online.

In doing so, the networks are discouraging cord-cutting, which is still uncommon, but growing fast. Networks want to preserve the fees that cable and satellite companies pay them for every subscriber who gets those channels on television. The good news here is that to compensate for the disappearing online-only option, Turner has made it very easy for online viewers to access live games of the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament.

That’s crucial when games are during the workday, when access to a TV is limited. For starters, Turner and its broadcasting partner, CBS Corp., have centralized where you can find the games. Last year, as a Time Warner Cable subscriber, I had to first figure out which network was carrying a particular game and then go to that network’s website to enter my Time Warner password. Watching on a mobile device required yet another password after paying the $4 fee. That made March Madness maddening.

This time, it’s one site (or app) and one password. I expected I’d need to enter my password right away. Instead, both the website and the app let me start watching live games first. CBS is broadcasting about a quarter of the early-round games and most of the later ones. You can watch as much as you want of those games online. The Turner games are limited to four hours without a password. You don’t have to use that all at once. The idea is that you’d use that time to figure out your account information. In my case, it’s the same one I use to access cable bills online.

But unless you know you’re limited to four hours, you wouldn’t know to look for your password. In making it easy to start watching, Turner is also making it easy to overlook the limit. You’re promised warnings along the way, though I never noticed any in my multitasking. The timer appears tied to Adobe’s video player, so clearing the cookie data files on my browser didn’t reset it. But after my four hours ran out on a MacBook, I was still able to watch on an iMac, an iPad and an Android phone.

That’s good because my pay-TV password doesn’t work. A few months ago, I downgraded to a barebones TV service that excludes the Turner channels.

Time Warner Cable knows that and won’t let me through.—AFP

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

H E A LT H & S C I E N C E

CRE small in number but a deadly threat

BLOOMINGTON, Illinois: Sara Baker cooks dinner with her daughter Megan at their home Feb 19, 2013.—MCT

Doubts surface about common food additive’s safety CHICAGO: Sara Baker says the light went on in her head after a cup of hot cocoa set off a storm in her stomach. “I went back and looked at the package and there it was: carrageenan,” said Baker, a career services coordinator from Bloomington in central Illinois. Baker been taking medication for ulcerative colitis for years but still suffered debilitating digestive flare-ups without warning. She had read warnings about carrageenan in a natural health newsletter but didn’t take them seriously. This time, though, “it really clicked,” she said of the ingredient, which researchers say has not been conclusively linked to gastrointestinal problems in humans. “It took awhile to learn just how many things it’s in, but now that know, I can avoid it and I no longer have the problems.”

Experiences like Baker’s have led some people with gastrointestinal problems to sidestep mainstream medical advice and avoid carrageenan, a seaweed-derived texturizer found in meat, dairy and other processed foods - including some organic products. For scientists, however, these are just anecdotes. Though studies on lab animals and human cells have suggested that carrageenan can cause gastrointestinal inflammation, many researchers and physicians say it’s unclear whether it has the same impact on people who consume it.

Scientists at the University of Illinois at Chicago and University of Chicago are seeking to address that question with a controlled clinical trial that Baker is participating in. “I believe it’s worth investigating and doing the science to find out,” said Dr Stephen Hanauer, a medical professor and chief of gastroenterology and nutrition at University of Chicago Medicine. His coresearcher, UIC physician and professor Joanne Tobacman, has been looking at the health effects of carrageenan for more than a decade and is concerned enough to have petitioned the US Food and Drug Administration in 2008 to prohibit the use of carrageenan in food.

Her petition cited decades of publicly funded, peer-reviewed science - including her own - on carrageenan-induced inflammation in animals and cells. In June, the FDA responded with a letter of denial. “It was disappointing that with such clear evidence about the effects of carrageenan on inflammation, the FDA did not restrict the use of carrageenan, particularly in infant formula,” Tobacman said. Europe does not allow the ingredient in formula. The additive, which lends a uniform, creamy texture to food, can be found in soy milk, yogurt, ice cream, cheeses, some meats, diet soft drinks and even toothpaste.

Michael Adams, deputy director of the FDA’s Office of Food Additive Safety, said

the petition did not make a compelling case to re -examine the safety of carrageenan. “It has been reviewed repeatedly

by FDA scientists and other international organizations, and in the judgment of those experts there hasn’t been a problem,” he said. Adams called a rat study from 2006 “the gold standard for us because it exactly mimics the exposure consumers are going to get when they eat these carrageenancontaining foods.” That study was funded and performed by a manufacturer of carrageenan. Adams said he didn’t know that but added: “If you look at the science and you believe it’s well done it doesn’t matter where the money comes from.”

The Cornucopia Institute, a Wisconsinbased organic industry watchdog group, on released a report on carrageenan called “How a Natural Food Additive Is Making Us Sick.” Charlotte Vallaeys, Cornucopia’s director of food policy, said the group felt “an ethical obligation” to raise awareness. “If government agencies weren’t going to protect consumers, then it seemed we needed to let consumers know about this so they could protect themselves.” The institute also is challenging the FDA’s denial of Tobacman’s petition. Among other objections, Cornucopia’s letter to the agency asks why officials did not consider any studies on carrageenan published in the last four years.

Adams said the FDA’s scientific evaluation in response to the petition was finished in May 2009, after which it spent more than three years in what he calls the “administrative chain.” Regarding infant formula, Adams said Europe takes a different approach to food additives than the US, sometimes banning a substance when toxicity studies raise concerns but are not conclusive. “The Europeans do their business that way but we don’t,” he said. “We would base it more on the science we have rather than waiting for science to be developed.”

While the Chicago researchers proceed with their work and advocates seek federal action, some consumers and activists have made an impact on their own by lobbying manufacturers directly to phase out the ingredient. Last month Stonyfield joined a number of manufacturers who have removed or have pledged to remove carrageenan from their organic products.

Organic Valley says it has removed the ingredient from most food items but is still working on reformulations for soy milk, chocolate milk and one version of its whipping cream. A representative of the organic dairy company Horizon Organic and soy milk maker Silk (each majority owned by Dean Foods) said both view carrageenan as safe and would not comment on any plans to remove it. — MCT

CHICAGO: A family of drug-resistant bacteria that experts say kills up to 50 percent of people infected is spreading, prompting doctors and public health officials to step up efforts to protect patients. Infections caused by these germs called carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae, or CRE - are still rare, but they are difficult and sometimes impossible to treat. Carbapenems are antibiotics used as a last-resort treatment for seriously ill people.

No one knows the exact number of CRE infections or deaths nationwide, though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are working on a report that would compile those statistics for the first time. But the CDC says an increasing percentage of germs in the enterobacteriaceae family are becoming resistant to carbapenems. A decade ago, 1 percent of these bacteria were resistant; now 4 percent are. One type has increased from 2 percent to 10 percent.

In all, more than 70 kinds of bacteria have developed carbapenem resistance.

One type recently dentified in Chicago is called carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella, first reported in the US in 2001. It didn’t exist in Chicago before 2007, experts say, but by 2011 it had emerged and spread quickly. A state health department survey conducted that year found that every hospital in suburban Cook County and 80 percent of hospitals in Chicago had identified at least one patient infected with it. So far, CRE have been identified only in patients in hospitals, nursing homes and other long-term acute care hospitals, but health professionals say the bacteria could pose a threat to public health if it spreads into the general community.

During an outbreak of one type of CRE in 2011 at the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, six patients died from the infection and five died from underlying disease while infected. “CRE are nightmare bacteria,” Dr Tom Frieden, director of the CDC, said recently. “They pose a triple threat. First, they’re resistant to all or nearly all antibiotics. Even some of our last-resort drugs. Second, they have high mortality rates. They kill up to half of people who get serious infections with them. And third, they can spread their resistance to other bacteria.”

For example, carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella could spread genes that interfere with the body’s ability to respond to antibiotics to E. coli bacteria, which are the most common cause of urinary tract infections in healthy people.

Information about the number of CRE infections is scarce in part because only six states require health facilities to report cases - Tennessee, Oregon, Minnesota, Colorado, Wisconsin and North Dakota. The CDC said its surveillance systems pick up the percentage of pathogens resistant to particular drugs, not the number of cases or deaths.

Wisconsin, which required hospitals to report CRE infections starting in December 2011, has since identified 25 cases in 17 of the state’s 137 hospitals and long-term acute care facilities.

Nineteen involved a carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella species; the others were carbapenemresistant E. coli. The CDC has tracked CRE from a single healthcare facility in one state in 2001 to health care facilities in at least 42 states. In some of those places, these bacteria have become rel-

atively commonplace, Frieden said.

Illinois health officials are working on a rule that would require hospitals to report CRE cases.

Meanwhile, hospital administrators across the area say they are accelerating their infection control efforts. CRE are spread by unclean hands, but medical devices such as ventilators or catheters increase the risk of life-threatening infection because they can introduce new bacteria into the bloodstream. The CDC last year recommended that facilities promote proper hand washing by health care workers, remove medical devices such as catheters as soon as possible, isolate patients who are infected or carry the bacteria and make sure that health workers are using protective gloves and gowns when touching patients with CRE, among other things.

The first Chicago case was reported in Dec 2007, said Dr Mary Hayden, an infectious disease specialist who has been studying the organism as part of a CDC-funded project. Hayden is director of the clinical microbiology laboratory at Rush University Medical Center, which she said identified its first infected patient in May 2008.

“We knew it was a big deal to see even a single case so we immediately started investigating and defining the problem,” said Hayden.

Hayden said taking a regional approach is key because patients often are transferred between facilities, such as from a nursing home to a hospital or from one hospital to another.

The movement of undiagnosed patients creates an opportunity for the bacteria to spread. “That’s not the kind of thing that any one hospital can deal with successfully,” Hayden said. “We need to cooperate among ourselves and work on this problem together in order to be successful in slowing the rate of increase and, ideally, eradicating CRE from the region.”

Frieden urged health facilities to employ a “detect and protect” strategy, which involves identifying the presence of the organism and

protecting other patients to prevent its spread.

In February, Rush started screening all adult ICU patients upon admission and all adult patients directly transferred from any outside facility to a medical unit, said Mary Alice Lavin, Rush’s director of infection prevention and control. “We’re being proactive in our approach to identify infected patients so that we can put them in isolation and use contact precautions like (protective) gloves and gowns,” Lavin said.

Patients whose clinical cultures detect CRE are not placed in rooms with uninfected patients, and all patients in the medical unit where the CRE patient stayed are screened to make sure the bacteria was not transmitted, she said. “We have been very successful with that approach,” Lavin said. Given the seriousness of the problem, Hayden said, health professionals need to take a broad approach. “We need help from people at the highest level to address this in a long-term, big-picture way,” she said. “We need new antibiotics. We need to study the best ways to address this problem with health care workers. But we don’t need panic. That’s not particularly helpful. We need a measured approach to this.”

Frieden said health facilities have been successful in controlling CRE by using CDC-recommended prevention and control techniques. But Betsy McCaughey, chairman and founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, a patient advocacy group, said CDC officials haven’t gone far enough. She wants the CDC to push for mandatory CRE screenings at hospitals in all states and require public reporting of data. “If patients are going into the hospital for something elective like a hip replacement, they would want to avoid going into a hospital that is battling carbapenem-resistant bacteria,” she said.

Health authorities advise consumers to take simple precautions to protect themselves, such as frequently washing their hands properly. — MCT

CHICAGO: Erica Hillesland holds a petri dish containing cultures of carbapenem-resistant enterobacteraceae at the Rush University Medical Lab on March 12, 2013. — MCT

Foraged food finds way to US tables CARRBORO, North Carolina: No arugula could be found in the salad mix for sale this month at a new outdoor food market in North Carolina. Instead, tiny purple nettle flowers were scattered among the familiar pointed oval leaves of the chickweed plant. Familiar, that is, because the plant grows wild in yards, fields and pavement cracks in the town of Carrboro, North Carolina, and across much of North America. The unusual salad was one of the offerings at what organizers believe is the first US market devoted to wild food and herbs, a kind of non-farmer’s market that will be held monthly in the town near the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

A similar weekly market is scheduled to open next month in Asheville, making North Carolina the latest hot spot in the growing movement toward eating food foraged from forests and fields rather than cultivated on farms. The trend has gained cachet among foodies, with dishes featuring everything from exotic mushrooms found deep in forests to humble dandelions that are the scourge of suburban lawns. Foraging tours have cropped up across the country and farm-totable dinners are giving way to forage-to-table affairs.

Wild food expert “Wildman” Steve Brill, who leads tours in New York City’s Central Park, created a foraging app with descriptions of local plants and recipes. The head chef at Copenhagen’s Noma, named “the best restaurant in the world” three years running by Restaurant magazine, is known for foraging his ingredients. “Europe has embraced foraging for a while, and I think it’s really taking hold in this country now,” said Josh Lev, co-founder of the Wild Food + Herb Market in Carrboro. “It fits in with this idea of getting back to basics.”

Selling wild food raises questions about the value of paying for plants people could pick from their own yards. Lev said his market is aimed more at creating awareness of wild foods and herbs than making a profit from them. “I’m trying to

build a community of people who appreciate the plants that grow around them and what an important resource they are,” said Lev, an herbalist, inventor and artist who recently moved to North Carolina from California. “We want to reconnect people to that kind of knowledge.” The outdoor market is set up like a farmer’s market, with vendors signing up and selling their products. Many vendors also hold classes and tours. The market’s debut this month included a walk through the town commons to teach participants how to identify common edible plants. The educational efforts help new foragers distinguish between edible plants and those that are less palatable or even poisonous. Picking mushrooms, in particular, requires expertise to avoid eating something harmful. Judith and Phil Morse already had taken a wild food tour at the suggestion of a friend before they visited the market in Carrboro. They did not feel confident enough in their knowledge of what was edible to forage for dinner, but they were getting closer. “You really do get tuned into the plant world,” said Phil Morse, 69, who lives in a nearby rural county.

“It’s really given us a different perspective about food.” Alan Muskat, a longtime forager who is organizing the Asheville market, said eating wild foods was not only cheap and healthy but good for the environment. “It really takes on the whole idea of agriculture, which is so foundational to the way we think about food,” he said.

Cornell University ecologist Antonio DiTommaso said he was encouraged by the growing interest in eating wild plants and thinks the trend could affect which crops are grown. He no longer buys lettuce in the summer, he said, choosing instead to eat a mixture of plants from his yard in upstate New York.

He wondered how far the movement could go in supplanting traditional agriculture. “It might have been okay 10,000 years ago,” said DiTommaso, an assistant professor in the crop and soil sciences department. “If we get all of New York City

running through our fields in upstate New York, I don’t know that there would be much left.”

Muskat, who studied philosophy and ecology at Princeton University, said he sold foraged mushrooms to high-end restaurants for more than 15 years, often selling more than 500 pounds of them a year at prices of $12 to $40 a pound. Foragers have met sporadic resistance, usually due to concerns that rare plants and mushrooms will be over harvested. Many public parks prohibit or at least restrict foraging. New York City parks adopted a non-foraging stance after noting an uptick in the number of people doing it

there. The national parks make exceptions for certain abundant foods, such as cactus pears in Arizona’s Casa Grande Ruins National Monument and berries at Cape Cod National Seashore.

But even in those cases, the food can be taken solely for personal use, not for sale. On a recent walk, Muskat was careful to pick only small pieces of a ginger-like root, leaving plenty to keep growing. He insists foraging is good for the long-term health of natural areas. “Foraging makes the woods more valuable,” Muskat said. “And when something has value, you protect it.” —Reuters

Flash reports consistent with single meteor: NASA WASHINGTON: Reports of a flash of light that streaked across the sky over the US. East Coast appeared to be a “single meteor event,” the US space agency said. Residents along the most densely populated stretch of the country lit up social media with surprise. “Judging from the brightness, we’re dealing with something as bright as the full moon,” Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environmental Office said Friday. “We basically have (had) a boulder enter the atmosphere over the northeast.”

Cooke said the meteor was widely seen, with more than 350 reports on the website of the American Meteor Society alone. Robert Lunsford of the society told USA Today “it basically looked like a super bright shooting star”. The sky flash was spotted as far south as Florida and as far north as New England, the newspaper reported.

Matt Moore, a news editor with AP, said he was standing in line for a concert in Philadelphia around dusk when he saw “a brilliant flash moving across the sky at a very brisk pace... and utterly silent”. “It was clearly high up in the atmosphere,” he said. “But from the way it appeared, it looked like a plane preparing to land at the airport.”

Moore said the flash was visible to him for about two to three seconds, and then it was gone. He described it as having a “spherical shape and yellowish and you could tell it was burning, with the trail that it left behind.”

Derrick Pitts, chief astronomer at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute, agreed that the sightings had all the hallmarks of a “fireball”. Pitts said this one got more attention because it happened on a Friday evening - and because Twitter has provided a way for people to share information on sightings. He said what people likely saw was one meteor - or “space rock” - that may have been the size of a volleyball and fell fairly far down into the Earth’s atmosphere. He likened it to a stone skipping across the water - getting “a nice long burn out of it.” Pitts said experts “can’t be 100 percent certain of what it was, unless it actually fell to the ground and we could actually track the trajectory.” But he said the descriptions by so many people are “absolutely consistent” with those of a meteor. — AP

H E A LT H & S C I E N C E

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

Waiter, there’s Nicaraguan iguana in my soup!

MANAGUA: Catholics tired of fish on Friday can enjoy a Lent-friendly smorgasbord in Nicaragua, where soups made with iguana or armadillo are served with a healthy portion of bull testicles. The delicacies violate local laws against eating such species during their breeding period, but are seen as a meat-free dish in the lead-up to Easter. They are also considered an aphrodisiac, and thus popular with older men. “It is really tasty. It is a traditional dish,” gushed Manuel Zamora as he bought two iguanas at a market. The popular Iguana soup is made with the critter’s

meat and eggs, ground and toasted corn meal, and vegetables. Pedro Espinoza, a Nicaraguan who lives in Costa Rica but is home visiting, says, “I like the taste of iguana. The little eggs are delicious.”

Especially popular is a performance-enhancing soup called Levanta Muerto, which translates roughly as “Raises the Dead.” It is said to boost energy and virility, and nourish the brain. The soup consists of meat from the black, spiny-tailed iguana, brains, bone marrow, bull testicles and, in some cases, shellfish. “I love bull testicles,” said Jose Cordoba, a fan of the

dish, which is popular among older men and office workers.

Miriam Sirias, who runs a lunch counter in a Managua market, says people eat the soup to keep their gray matter sharp. Her chef Cristina Gutierrez cuts in to add: “A lot of people eat it for its aphrodisiac effect.”

Armadillo meat is also popular, even though some experts say it can carry the bacteria that causes leprosy. But it is the spiny-tailed iguana, known in Spanish as a garrobo, that is the biggest hit in popular Nicaraguan cooking. People here say it helps fight cancer, diabetes, anemia and

other ailments. Jennifer Gomez, accompanying her mother to the market, says garrobo flesh kills cancer cells, claiming she has a neighbor who has had cancer for nine years but keeps it in check by eating garrobo three times a week. “She has not died,” Gomez said.

Demand for the garrobo in particular is so fierce that live animals are brought to markets in large numbers, even though you are not supposed to hunt them during their breeding season from September to April.

“Here, we sell them skinned,” said one vendor, Iveth, as she chops the

head off a garrobo, removes the skin, rips out the guts and hands over the body and eggs to a customer, all for the equivalent of less than four dollars. Another soup popular along Nicaragua’s very poor Atlantic coast is made of tur tle flesh, fish, beef coconut milk and vegetables.

Enrique Rimbaud, head of an environmental group called Amarte, said it is a pity to sacrifice all these animals. He is collecting signatures to press Nicaragua’s parliament to pass a law protecting 187 endangered species by classifying them as part of the national heritage. —AFP

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

W H AT ’ S O N

Ali Alghanim & Sons Automotive celebrates success with employees

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hat’s more fun than clicking a beautiful picture? Sharing it with others! Let other people see the way you see Kuwait - through your lens. Friday Times will feature snapshots of Kuwait through Instagram feeds. If you want to share your Instagram photos, email us at instagram@kuwaittimes.net

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appy birthday wishes to Niveditha Behju Balan. Loving greetings from friends and classmates at SIMS.

Announcements CRYcket 2013 tournament riends of CRY Club (FOCC) announces 16th CRY (Child Rights & You) cricket tournament for children and will be held at the GC grounds at Jaleeb Al-Shuyoukh on Friday, 12th Apr 2013 from 6:30 a.m to 4:30 pm. The one day “CRYcket” tournament is a very popular annual family event, participated by children under 14. 12 teams each are set to participate in the Under-12 and Under-14 divisions initially in four groups in round robin fashion leading to 4 winners who will clash in the semifinals. The last date for registration of Teams is 5th Apr 2013. For more details & game rules, visit the FOCC website http://www.focckwt.org

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Basketball Academy he new Premier Basketball Academy offers coaching and games every Friday and Saturday from 10 am onwards for 6 to 18 year olds, boys and girls.

Located in Bayan Block 7, Masjed Al-Aqsa Street by Abdullah Al-Rujaib High School. Free Basketball and Tee Shirts for all participants, with certificates and special awards on completion of each 6 week course.

Qualified and experienced British and American Coaches, Everyone Welcome.

Ties Center Ties Center cordially invites to the following March activities: 1- Movie Night: Women in Islam The right status and responsibility of Muslim women are some of the least understood topics when talking about Islam. Prophet Muhammad (SAW) recognized women as individuals with specific rights and responsibilities more than 1,400 years ago. He encouraged educating women and returned their Allah-given rights back to them. Many Muslim women today are asserting these rights and reclaiming their status as equal partners in society. Come a long with your friends to enjoy this educating movie in a serene environment at the TIES Center on March 25, 2013 at 7:00pm.

2 - Lecture entitled, “The Impact of Islamic Civilization on the West.” On March 26, 2013, Bryn Barnard will be discussing the impact of Islamic civilization on the West, the subject of his book The Genius of Islam: How Muslims Made the Modern World. This one hour illustrated PowerPoint talk will include aspects of Islamic philosophy, art, book arts, music, astronomy, medicine, engineering ; a discussion of how Islamic civilization is presented in North American schools; and suggestions about why the deep historical connections between Islam and the West are not better known today. Copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing after the presentation. Bryn Barnard is an author and illustrator with twenty five years’ experience creating images for clients that include NASA, National Geographic and Scientific American. He has illustrated twenty-five books for children and is the author and illustrator of three books, all published by Random House, New York: Dangerous Planet: Natural Disasters That Changed History, Outbreak: Plagues That Changed History, and The Genius of Islam: How Muslims Made the Modern World, published last April. The Genius of Islam was on the November cover of Booklist magazine and selected as one of its top ten books on religion published in 2011. The Genius of Islamalso received the top award for non-fiction from the Middle East Outreach Council, a North American university educational consortium. The Genius of Islam will be published in Arabic in 2012 by Dar Al-Ilm Lilmalayin, Beirut.

Bryn Barnard teaches art at the American International School of Kuwait. If you are interested in the topic, TIES Center is the best place to visit on March 26, 2013 at 7:00pm.

Ties is the leading non-political NGO promoting relations between Westerners and Muslims through dialogue, friendship and cultural knowledge exchange. For more information, please log into: www.tiescenter.net

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nnual open day demonstrates importer’s commitment to staff Ali Alghanim & Sons Automotive, the BMW Group importer in Kuwait, recently held an open day focused on rewarding its employees for their contribution to the company’s record 2012 sales results the most successful year in its history. This annual initiative demonstrates Ali Alghanim & Sons Automotive’s commitment to its employees and is just one of the ways the importer recognizes their hard work and loyalty.

Present at the event was representatives from the management of Ali Alghanim & Sons Automotive who

thanked attendees for their hard work and ongoing professionalism. Throughout the day, staff members and their families enjoyed a wide range of activities and team competitions, whilst reflecting on the company’s 2012 success.

The open day also included a special entertainment program featuring a raffle prize draw for the employees Ali Alghanim & Sons Automotive management team thanked the employees for their efforts and contribution to the company’s 2012 sales achievements, also encouraged staff to aim higher and strive to excel in all elements

of the business, in particular customer service. Marking this occasion Yousef Al Qatami, General Manager of Ali Alghanim & Sons Automotive said: “We wanted to recognize the contribution made by our employees to the 37% increase in BMW and MINI vehicle sales that we achieved in 2012 - the highest growth witnessed by any BMW Group Middle East importer. It is their commitment to providing premium quality products and services, while delivering excellence in customer service that has allowed our company, and the BMW Group brands, to reach such heights in Kuwait.”

McDonald’s ‘Tastes of the World’ tour

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cDonald’s Kuwait’s tours around the world continued yesterday with the highly anticipated launch of the second sandwich in its Tastes of the World promotion - The Turkish. Offering a special Turkish beef patty nestled in mustard, mayo, sliced onions, pickles, shredded lettuce and a cheese slice, all tucked into a sesame seed bun, The Turkish promises a delicious taste sensation not to be missed.

The Turkish will be available in all McDonald’s Kuwait restaurants for a limited time.

George Khawam, Marketing Director said: “We know our customers always enjoy

an unexpected twist on a McDonald’s classic. Our last Tastes of the World sandwich, The Asian, proved to be an incredible success, and we’re sure the exotic flavor and spice of The Turkish will satisfy once again.”

Following the overwhelming success of the 2012 Tastes of the World Promotion, McDonald’s again pays tribute to exotic flavor profiles by offering a limited time range of sandwiches inspired by unique destinations around the world. Customers wondering about the other sandwiches will have to wait patiently until they are launched; McDonald’s is keeping their identities a closely-guarded secret.

Kunchan Nampiar tele-drama on TV on March 27

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unchan Nampiar, a tele-drama produced by Mangaf based drama activist Babu Chakkola, who also plays the lead role will be telecasted on JaiHind TV this Wednesday.

The tele-drama, originally a half an hour play, based on the life of an 18th century satire poet Kunchan Nampiar had bagged the best actor award for Babu Chakkola in the drama competition organized by Kerala Art Lovers’ Association a few months ago in Kuwait.

The shooting of the tele-drama Kunchan Nampiar was done on Feb 21 at Indian central School, Abbassiya. Regi Bhaskaran of Kairali TV filmed the drama

and noted sound technician Varghese Paul joined the team, Chakkola said.

“The digitalization of a drama is a way of storing it for the future generations”, said Babu Chakkola who runs own business in Ahmadi.

“Considering the make-up, the efforts of everyone involved, the filming of a drama is a souvenir for the drama-team too”, added Chakkola who comes up with at least one drama project each year, usually presented by Kalpak Theater, Kuwait. Last year, other than the award winning Kunchan Nampiar, Chakkola acted, notably, in the lead role of the Kalpak produced epic drama St Paul.

Exclusive Cinema Event for @Tijari Customers

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he Commercial Bank of Kuwait will be organizing an exclusive cinema event for @Tijari customers by giving them two free tickets to the movie premiere of GI Joe: Retaliation on Wednesday 27 March at Grand Cinemas in Al-Hamra Luxury Center at 8pm. They will be the first in Kuwait to watch the film since it will be shown to the public in all cinemas starting Thursday 28 March. GI Joe: Retaliation continues the story of the first GI Joe movie that was a big success when it was released in 2009 and

stars Bruce Willis, The Rock, and Channing Tatum. @Tijari customers can visit any Al Tijari branch and collect their tickets and since this is a popular event the tickets are limited. It should be noted that @Tijari is a savings account designed for customers aged 15 to 21 years old with the intent to help establish their future and pave the way to success. The Commercial Bank of Kuwait always strives to give its customers the best offers and thank them for their continuous loyalty.

Write to us Send to What’s On upcoming events, birthdays or celebrations by email: local@kuwaittimes.net Fax: 24835619 / 20

Malayali Media Forum (MMF), Kuwait held an interactive session with K K Shahina, an Indian journalist and a correspondent with ‘Open’ publication yesterday. In her interaction, Shahina, who is the former correspondent of Tehelka magazine, shed light on certain disturbing trends in Indian media and the consequent impact on freedom of expression and human rights. MMF General Convener Anil P Alex presided over the session while Cultural Convener Gafoor Moodadi welcomed the guest and the participants. Convener Regi Bhaskar proposed a vote of thanks.

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

W H AT ’ S O N

NBK Capital holds Family Fun Day

Embassy Information EMBASSY OF AUSTRALIA The Australian Embassy Kuwait does not have a visa or immigration department.

All processing of visas and immigration matters in conducted by The Australian Consulate-General in Dubai. Email: info.ausdxb@vfshelpline.com (VFS) immigration.dubai@dfat.gov.au (Visa Office); Tel: +971 4 355 1958 (VFS) - +971 4 508 7200 (Visa Office); Fax: +971 4 355 0708 (Visa Office). In Kuwait applications can be lodged at the Australian Visa Application Centre 4B 1st Floor, Al-Banwan Building Al-Qibla Area, Ali Al-Salem Street, opposite the Central Bank of Kuwait, Kuwait City, Kuwait. Working hours and days: 09:30 - 17:30; Sunday - Thursday. Or visit their website www.vfs-au-gcc-com for more information. Kuwait citizens can apply for tourist visas on-line at www.immi.gov.au/e visa/e676.htm. nnnnnnn

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BK Capital held its Family Fun Day on Saturday March 16th at Safir International Hotel in Egalia.

Many junior and senior members of the organization attended and brought along their friends and family to the allday event which was set in the landscaped beach side gardens at the hotel.

The festivities which included many activities for children and adults alike commenced at 10 am and ended a little after sunset. Children were able to experience the many amenities provided such as baby foot tables, bouncy castles, playgrounds, and were able to partake in competitions, face painting, and giveaways. Members of NBK Capital staff enjoyed a leisurely buffet lunch, music and good weather.

NBK Capital prides itself on creating these initiatives for its employees, as it aims to create a unique corporate culture rooted in commitment to integrity, collaboration, transparency and excellence.

Dr. Khalil Cotran, Managing Director Human Resources at NBK Capital commented, “Our corporate values are deeply rooted in our passion for commitment, enthusiasm and motivation. Our initiatives aim to cultivate a synergy that provides our employees with a strong sense of teamwork and communication.”

NBK Capital Family Fun Day is one of many events that have become an integral part of the organization’s culture. In 2012, these activities included an internal photo gallery exhibit, an outdoor movie night and an end of year brunch.

EMBASSY OF CANADA The Embassy of Canada in Kuwait does not have a visa or immigration department. All processing of visa and immigration matters including enquiries is conducted by the Canadian Embassy in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Individuals who are interested in working, studying, visiting or immigrating to Canada should contact the Canadian Embassy in Abu Dhabi, website: www.UAE.gc.ca or www.goingtocanada.gc.ca, E-mail: abdbi-imenquiry@international.gc.ca. The Embassy of Canada is located at Villa 24, Al-Mutawakei St, Block 4 in Da’aiyah. Please visit our website at www.Kuwait.gc.ca. The Embassy of Canada is open from 07:30 to 15:30 Sunday through Thursday. The reception is open from 07:30 to 12:30. Consular services for Canadian citizens are provided from 09:00 until 12:00, Sunday through Wednesday.

Australian College of Kuwait announces its 3rd Moto Bazaar

F

ollowing the success of the 1st and 2nd Moto Bazaar, the Australian College of Kuwait (ACK) has announced that it is organizing “Moto Bazaar 3”, which will be held on the college’s campus on the 3rd and 4th of April, 2013. Due to its instant success, ACK’s Moto Bazaar has become one of the college’s most anticipated, annual events. The second Moto Bazaar, held in March of last year, wit-

nessed a record-high attendance of approximately 12,000 visitors over a two-day period. Moto Bazaar is an enthusiasts’ show exhibiting more than 300 cars and motorcycles ranging from classics, sports cars, trucks, SUVs, customized bikes and more.

Moto Bazaar 3 will also receive a boost with the participation of the “Kuwait Hod Rod Club”, the “Harley Owners Group (HOG) - Kuwait Chapter, the

“Corvette Club” and many others. The bazaar will also contain up to 120 booths, whereby a wide range of energetic vendors will be showcasing their products for sale. The college has also announced that there are still booth-rental opportunities available to established entities and individuals aiming to maximize their exposure to such an important demographic.

PLG-children learn through play

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lay, Learn & Grow Preschool (PLG) in association with the Kuwait Small Projects Development Co(KSPD) is owned and Managed by Tahani AlShamlan and Terri Allen. PLG implements the core knowledge, American curriculum. It has been enticing children (ages 1 to 4) to learn since its opening in September 2012.

According to Allen, the Core Knowledge Foundation is an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization from which PLG’s philosophy, Knowledge builds on. For this reason, states Allen, Arabic is used in the classrooms and is the foundation from which English is taught. The children learn through play the children think they’re simply playing but each class is specifically structured to achieve a certain learning goal. Islam is also incorporated into this fun and

engaging curriculum.

With a Kuwaiti and American administration and an experienced and qualified staff, Alshamlan asserts that PLG’s aim is to provide children with a safe and creative learning environment. She added that independence, self reliance and a solid preparation of pre-writing/prereading skills needed for kindergarten is PLG’s priority. Also, the children are taken on educational and entertaining trips bimonthly.

By having cameras in every classroom and activity rooms, parents are encouraged to follow their child’s progress via the Internet. Being centrally located in Bayan, block 13, across from the American Embassy, PLG Preschool fosters a local community type atmosphere with children attending from Bayan and surrounding areas.

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EMBASSY OF CYPRUS In its capacity as EU Local Presidency in the State of Kuwait, the Embassy of the Republic of Cyprus, on behalf of the Member States of the EU and associated States participating in the Schengen cooperation, would like to announce that as from 2nd October 2012 all Schengen States’ Consulates in Kuwait will use the Visa Information System (VIS). The VIS is a central database for the exchange of data on shortstay (up to three months) visas between Schengen States. The main objectives of the VIS are to facilitate visa application procedures and checks at external border as well as to enhance security. The VIS will contain all the Schengen visa applications lodged by an applicant over five years and the decisions taken by any Schengen State’s consulate. This will allow applicants to establish more easily the lawful use of previous visas and their bona fide status. For the purpose of the VIS, applicants will be required to provide their biometric data (fingerprints and digital photos) when applying for a Schengen visa. It is a simple and discreet procedure that only takes a few minutes.

Biometric data, along with the data provided in the Schengen visa application form, will be recorded in the VIS central database.

Therefore, as from 2nd October 2012, firsttime applicants will have to appear in person when lodging the application, in order to provide their fingerprints. For subsequent applications within 5 years the fingerprints can be copied from the previous application file in the VIS. The Cypriot Presidency would like to assure the people of Kuwait and all its permanent citizens that the Member States and associated States participating in the Schengen cooperation, have taken all necessary technical measures to facilitate the rapid examination and the efficient processing of visa applications and to ensure a quick and discreet procedure for the implementation of the new VIS. nnnnnnn

EMBASSY OF KENYA The Embassy of the Republic of Kenya wishes to inform the Kenyan community residents throughout Kuwait and the general public that the Embassy has acquired new office telephone numbers as follows: 25353982, 25353985 - Consular’s enquiries 25353987 - Fax Our Email address: info@kenyaembkuwait.com. nnnnnnn

Tahani AlShamlan

Terri Allen

Embassy of Mexico The Embassy of Mexico to Kuwait has the pleasure to announce the opening of its Consular Section where visa applications are already being handled. The Consular Section is open to the public from Sundays-Thursdays 09.00-12.00 hrs. at Cliffs Complex in Salmiya, Villa No. 6 (3rd floor).

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EMBASSY OF NIGERIA The Nigerian embassy has its new office in Mishref. Block 3, Street 7, House 4. For enquires please call 25379541. Fax25387719. Email- nigeriakuwait@yahoo.com or nigeriankuwait@yahoo.co.uk. nnnnnnn

EMBASSY OF TURKEY The Embassy of the Republic of Turkey announces that a new classes of Turkish language for beginners will start at the Embassy’s Tourism, Culture and Information Office on 17 February 2013. The lessons will be two times in a week for six weeks, for further details and registration please contact. Or fill the application form on http://kuveyt.bemfa.gov.tr and send it to the email: embassy.Kuwait@mfa.gov.tr

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

TV PROGRAMS

00:45 01:35 02:25 03:15 03:40 04:05 04:55 05:20 05:45 06:35 07:00 07:50 08:15 08:40 09:35 10:05 10:30 11:00 11:25 12:20 12:50 13:15 14:10 15:05 16:00 16:30 17:25 Baker 18:20 18:45 19:15 19:40 20:10 20:35 21:05 22:00 22:55 23:50

Swarm Chasers Untamed & Uncut Wildest Arctic Shamwari: A Wild Life Shamwari: A Wild Life World Wild Vet Shamwari: A Wild Life Escape To Chimp Eden Animal Precinct The Really Wild Show Dogs/Cats/Pets 101 Jeff Corwin Unleashed Jeff Corwin Unleashed My Cat From Hell Monkey Life Bondi Vet Shamwari: A Wild Life Escape To Chimp Eden Wildest Arctic Shamwari: A Wild Life Shamwari: A Wild Life World Wild Vet Animal Cops Houston Animal Precinct The Really Wild Show Dogs/Cats/Pets 101 Weird Creatures With Nick Breed All About It Breed All About It Monkey Life Bondi Vet Shamwari: A Wild Life Escape To Chimp Eden Wildest Arctic Wildest Islands Wild France Animal Cops Philadelphia

00:00 Homes Under The Hammer 00:50 Extreme Makeover: Home Edition 01:35 Come Dine With Me 02:25 Holmes On Homes 03:15 Masterchef: The Professionals 03:45 Masterchef: The Professionals 04:10 Celebrity Fantasy Homes 04:55 Bargain Hunt 05:40 Bargain Hunt 06:25 House Swap 07:10 Indian Food Made Easy 07:40 Indian Food Made Easy 08:05 Fantasy Homes By The Sea 08:50 Homes Under The Hammer 09:45 Bargain Hunt 10:30 Antiques Roadshow 11:30 Extreme Makeover: Home Edition 12:15 Masterchef: The Professionals 12:45 Masterchef: The Professionals 13:10 Come Dine With Me 14:00 Nigel Slater’s Simple Cooking 14:30 French Food At Home 14:55 Holmes On Homes 15:40 Bargain Hunt 16:25 Antiques Roadshow 17:15 Extreme Makeover: Home Edition 18:00 Homes Under The Hammer 18:50 Nigel Slater’s Simple Cooking 19:20 Baking Mad With Eric Lanlard 19:45 Baking Mad With Eric Lanlard 20:10 French Food At Home 20:35 Come Dine With Me 21:30 Fantasy Homes By The Sea 22:20 Antiques Roadshow 23:15 Bargain Hunt

00:05 00:30 00:55 01:20 01:45 02:10 02:35 03:00 03:25 03:50 04:00 04:30 04:55 05:20

Taz-Mania Pink Panther And Pals Moomins Tom & Jerry Kids A Pup Named Scooby-Doo Puppy In My Pocket Wacky Races Looney Tunes Duck Dodgers Dastardly And Muttley Dexter’s Laboratory Wacky Races Sylvester & Tweety Mysteries Tom & Jerry

05:45 06:00 06:25 06:45 07:00 07:25 07:50 08:15 08:40 09:05 09:30 09:55 10:20 10:45 11:10 11:35 12:00 12:25 12:50 13:15 13:40 14:00 14:25 14:50 15:20 15:45 16:10 16:35 17:00 17:25 17:50 18:15 18:40 19:05 19:30 19:45 20:00 20:20 20:45 21:10 21:20 21:35 22:00 22:25 22:50 23:15 23:40

The Garfield Show Bananas In Pyjamas Gerald McBoing Boing Jelly Jamm Ha Ha Hairies Bananas In Pyjamas Lazytown Krypto: The Super Dog Jelly Jamm Gerald McBoing Boing Cartoonito Tales Bananas In Pyjamas Ha Ha Hairies Lazytown Krypto: The Super Dog Baby Looney Tunes Jelly Jamm Gerald McBoing Boing Cartoonito Tales Krypto: The Super Dog Lazytown A Pup Named Scooby-Doo Tom And Jerry Tales Sylvester & Tweety Mysteries Johnny Bravo Tiny Toons 13 Ghosts Of Scooby-Doo The Garfield Show What’s New Scooby-Doo? Sylvester & Tweety Mysteries Tom And Jerry Tales The Looney Tunes Show Tiny Toons 13 Ghosts Of Scooby-Doo Moomins The Garfield Show Sylvester & Tweety Mysteries Tom And Jerry Tales Moomins Dexters Laboratory Johnny Bravo Puppy In My Pocket The Garfield Show What’s New Scooby-Doo? Sylvester & Tweety Mysteries Tom & Jerry Tales The Looney Tunes Show

00:00 Amanpour 00:30 World Sport 01:00 Piers Morgan Tonight 02:00 World Report 02:30 World Sport 03:00 Anderson Cooper 360 04:00 Piers Morgan Tonight 05:00 Quest Means Business 06:00 The Situation Room 07:00 World Sport 07:30 News Special 08:00 World Report 09:00 World Report 10:00 World Sport 10:30 Inside Africa 11:00 World Business Today 12:00 World One 12:30 On China 13:00 Amanpour 13:30 CNN Newscenter 14:00 Piers Morgan Tonight 15:00 News Stream 16:00 World Business Today 17:00 International Desk 18:00 Global Exchange 19:00 World Sport 19:30 On China 20:00 International Desk 21:00 Quest Means Business 22:00 Amanpour 22:30 CNN Newscenter 23:00 Connect The World With Becky Anderson

00:15 01:10 02:05 03:00 03:55 04:20 04:50 05:15 05:40 06:05 07:00 07:50 08:45 09:10

Outback Truckers Driven To Extremes Finding Bigfoot Mythbusters How Stuff’s Made Auction Kings Auction Hunters How Do They Do It? How Stuff’s Made Sons Of Guns Mythbusters Ultimate Survival Magic Of Science Magic Of Science

09:40 Border Security 10:05 Auction Kings 10:30 Auction Hunters 10:55 How Do They Do It? 11:25 How It’s Made 11:50 Outback Truckers 12:45 Driven To Extremes 13:40 Finding Bigfoot 14:35 Border Security 15:05 Auction Kings 15:30 Auction Hunters 16:00 Inventions That Shook The World 16:55 Magic Of Science 17:20 Magic Of Science 17:50 Mythbusters 18:45 Sons Of Guns 19:40 How Do They Do It? 20:05 How It’s Made 20:35 Auction Kings 21:00 Auction Hunters 21:30 James May’s Man Lab 22:25 Superhuman Showdown 23:20 Mythbusters

00:15 The X-Testers 00:40 Gadget Show - World Tour 01:05 How Tech Works 01:35 Scrapheap Challenge 02:25 The X-Testers 02:50 The X-Testers 03:15 Bang Goes The Theory 03:45 Da Vinci’s Machines 04:35 Oddities 05:00 Oddities 05:25 Man-Made Marvels Asia 06:15 Science Of The Movies 07:05 NASA’s Greatest Missions 08:00 Da Vinci’s Machines 08:50 Man-Made Marvels Asia 09:40 Scrapheap Challenge 10:30 Science Of The Movies 11:25 Gadget Show - World Tour 11:50 How Tech Works 12:15 How The Universe Works 13:10 Man-Made Marvels Asia 14:00 Scrapheap Challenge 14:50 Bang Goes The Theory 15:20 Da Vinci’s Machines 16:10 The X-Testers 16:35 The X-Testers 17:00 Gadget Show - World Tour 17:25 How Tech Works 17:55 Science Of The Movies 18:45 Building The Future 19:35 NASA’s Greatest Missions 20:30 Last Flight Of The Space Shuttle 21:20 The Loch Ness Monster Revealed 22:10 Gadget Show - World Tour 22:35 How Tech Works 23:00 Last Flight Of The Space Shuttle 23:50 The Loch Ness Monster Revealed

00:10 00:35 01:00 01:25 01:50 02:15 02:40 03:05 03:30 03:55 04:20 04:45 05:10 05:35 06:00 06:15 06:40 07:05 07:30 07:55 08:20 08:45 09:10 09:35 10:00 10:25 10:50 11:15

Hannah Montana Brandy & Mr Whiskers Brandy & Mr Whiskers Replacements Replacements Emperor’s New School Emperor’s New School Brandy & Mr Whiskers Brandy & Mr Whiskers Replacements Replacements Emperor’s New School Emperor’s New School Brandy & Mr Whiskers Fish Hooks Suite Life On Deck My Babysitter’s A Vampire A.N.T. Farm Austin And Ally Jessie Good Luck Charlie Doc McStuffins Mickey Mouse Clubhouse A.N.T Farm Jonas Los Angeles So Random Hannah Montana Sonny With A Chance

ARCTIC BLAST ON OSN ACTION HD

11:40 12:05 12:30 12:55 13:20 13:45 14:10 14:35 15:00 15:25 15:50 16:15 16:40 17:00 17:30 17:55 18:20 18:45 19:10 19:35 20:00 20:30 20:50 21:15 21:40 22:05 22:30 22:55 23:20 23:45

Kim Possible Shake It Up Wizards Of Waverly Place That’s So Raven Austin And Ally Art Attack A.N.T Farm Suite Life On Deck My Babysitter’s A Vampire Shake It Up Austin And Ally Jessie A.N.T Farm Good Luck Charlie Gravity Falls Suite Life On Deck Austin And Ally My Babysitter’s A Vampire A.N.T Farm Good Luck Charlie Jessie That’s So Raven Cory In The House Phil Of The Future Hannah Montana Good Luck Charlie Good Luck Charlie Wizards Of Waverly Place Wizards Of Waverly Place Hannah Montana

00:20 Little Einsteins 00:50 Special Agent Oso 01:05 Special Agent Oso 01:15 Lazytown 01:40 Jungle Junction 01:55 Jungle Junction 02:10 Handy Manny 02:20 Handy Manny 02:30 Mickey Mouse Clubhouse 03:00 Lazytown 03:25 Special Agent Oso 03:40 Special Agent Oso 03:50 Imagination Movers 04:20 Handy Manny 04:30 Handy Manny 04:40 Special Agent Oso 04:50 Special Agent Oso 05:00 Timmy Time 05:10 Lazytown 05:35 Little Einsteins 06:00 Jungle Junction 06:15 Jungle Junction 06:30 Little Einsteins 06:50 Special Agent Oso 07:00 Special Agent Oso 07:15 Jungle Junction 07:30 Jungle Junction 07:45 Handy Manny 08:00 Special Agent Oso 08:15 Lazytown 08:45 New Adventures Of Winnie The Pooh 09:10 Timmy Time 09:20 Zou 09:35 Zou 09:50 Jake & The Neverland Pirates 10:05 Jake & The Neverland Pirates 10:20 Doc McStuffins 10:35 Doc McStuffins 10:50 Handy Manny 11:00 Lilo And Stitch 11:30 Cars Toons 11:35 Mouk 11:45 Art Attack 12:10 Imagination Movers 12:35 Mickey Mouse Clubhouse 13:00 Winnie The Pooh: Tales Of Friendship 13:10 Doc McStuffins 13:25 Handy Manny 13:40 Jungle Junction 13:55 Timmy Time 14:05 The Hive 14:15 Mouk 14:30 Little Einsteins 14:55 Mickey Mouse Clubhouse 15:20 New Adventures Of Winnie The Pooh 15:45 Jake & The Neverland Pirates 16:00 The Little Mermaid 16:25 Lilo And Stitch 16:55 Zou 17:10 Zou 17:20 Mouk 17:35 Mouk 17:45 Lilo And Stitch 18:10 The Hive 18:20 Cars Toons 18:25 Zou 18:40 Zou 18:55 Jake & The Neverland Pirates 19:10 Jake & The Neverland Pirates 19:25 Doc McStuffins 19:40 Doc McStuffins 19:55 Handy Manny 20:05 Timmy Time 20:15 Pajanimals 20:25 Doc McStuffins 20:40 Jake & The Neverland Pirates 20:55 Jake & The Neverland Pirates 21:10 Winnie The Pooh: Tales Of Friendship 21:20 The Hive 21:30 Pajanimals 21:45 Handy Manny 22:00 Mickey Mouse Clubhouse 22:25 Pajanimals 22:35 New Adventures Of Winnie The Pooh 23:00 Timmy Time 23:10 Animated Stories 23:15 A Poem Is...

23:20 Winnie The Pooh: Tales Of Friendship 23:30 Jungle Junction 23:45 Handy Manny 23:55 Mickey Mouse Clubhouse

00:00 00:55 01:25 03:15 03:40 04:10 05:05 06:00 07:50 08:20 09:15 10:15 12:05 12:35 13:05 13:35 14:05 York 14:30 York 15:00 15:30 16:30 17:00 18:00 19:00

Opening Act Style Star THS Style Star Extreme Close-Up THS E!es THS Style Star Opening Act Opening Act THS Khloe And Lamar Khloe And Lamar Married To Jonas Married To Jonas Kourtney & Kim Take New Kourtney & Kim Take New Style Star THS Extreme Close-Up Giuliana & Bill E! News Fashion Police

20:00 21:00 22:00 22:30 23:30

E!es Kourtney And Kim Take Miami Chasing The Saturdays E! News Chelsea Lately

00:15 Guy’s Big Bite 00:40 Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives 01:05 Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives 01:30 Heat Seekers 01:55 Outrageous Food 02:20 Unwrapped 02:45 Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives 03:10 Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives 03:35 Guy’s Big Bite 04:00 Guy’s Big Bite 04:25 Unique Eats 04:50 Food Crafters 05:15 Charly’s Cake Angels 05:40 Chopped 06:30 Iron Chef America 07:10 Unwrapped 07:35 Unwrapped 08:00 Unwrapped 08:25 Unwrapped 08:50 Healthy Appetite With Ellie Krieger 09:15 Healthy Appetite With Ellie Krieger 09:40 Symon’s Suppers 10:05 Barefoot Contessa 10:30 Barefoot Contessa 10:55 Cooking For Real 11:20 Cooking For Real 11:45 Unique Eats 12:10 Food Crafters 12:35 Charly’s Cake Angels 13:00 Iron Chef America 13:50 Symon’s Suppers 14:15 Barefoot Contessa - Back To Basics 14:40 Barefoot Contessa - Back To Basics 15:05 United Tastes Of America 15:30 Food Crafters 15:55 Guy’s Big Bite 16:20 Guy’s Big Bite 16:45 Chopped 17:35 Barefoot Contessa 18:00 Barefoot Contessa 18:25 Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives 18:50 Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives 19:15 Unique Sweets 19:40 Charly’s Cake Angels 20:05 Guy’s Big Bite 20:30 Chopped 21:20 Chopped 22:10 Iron Chef America 23:00 Charly’s Cake Angels 23:25 Charly’s Cake Angels 23:50 Unique Sweets

00:40 01:30 02:20 03:05 03:55 04:45 05:30 06:20 07:10 08:00 08:50 09:15 09:40 10:05 10:30 11:20 12:10 13:00 13:50 14:15 14:40 15:30 16:20 16:45 17:10 18:00 18:50 19:40 20:30 21:20 22:10 23:00 23:25 23:50

00:15 00:45 01:40 02:05 02:35 03:30 04:25 05:20 06:15 06:45 07:10 07:35 08:05 09:00 09:25 09:55 10:50 11:45 12:40 13:35 14:00 14:30 14:55 15:25 16:20 16:45 17:15 18:10 19:05 20:00 20:30 21:00 21:30 22:00 22:55 23:25 23:50

02:00 04:00 06:00 08:00 09:45 12:00 14:00 18:00 20:00 22:00

I Almost Got Away With It Dr G: Medical Examiner The Haunted Couples Who Kill Deadly Women I Almost Got Away With It Dr G: Medical Examiner The Haunted Murder Shift Mystery Diagnosis Street Patrol Street Patrol Real Emergency Calls Who On Earth Did I Marry?

On The Case With Paula Zahn Murder Shift Disappeared Mystery Diagnosis Street Patrol Street Patrol Forensic Detectives On The Case With Paula Zahn Real Emergency Calls Who On Earth Did I Marry?

Disappeared Murder Shift Forensic Detectives On The Case With Paula Zahn Disappeared Nightmare Next Door Couples Who Kill Evil, I Evil, I I Almost Got Away With It

Kimchi Chronicles Around The World For Free The Ride: Alaska To Patagonia The Ride: Alaska To Patagonia Adventure Wanted Banged Up Abroad City Chase Marrakech Around The World For Free Kimchi Chronicles David Rocco’s Dolce Vita 1 Exploring The Vine Kimchi Chronicles Around The World For Free The Ride: Alaska To Patagonia The Ride: Alaska To Patagonia Adventure Wanted Banged Up Abroad City Chase Marrakech Around The World For Free Kimchi Chronicles David Rocco’s Dolce Vita 1 Exploring The Vine Kimchi Chronicles Around The World For Free The Ride: Alaska To Patagonia The Ride: Alaska To Patagonia Adventure Wanted Banged Up Abroad City Chase Marrakech Exploring The Vine Kimchi Chronicles Kimchi Chronicles David Rocco’s Dolce Vita 1 Around The World For Free Kimchi Chronicles David Rocco’s Dolce Vita 1 Making Tracks

The Rite-18 Riddles Of The Sphinx-PG15 True Justice: Blood Alley-PG15 Arctic Blast-PG15 Boiler Room-PG15 Carjacked-PG15 Arctic Blast-PG15 Carjacked-PG15 The Thaw-PG15 The Ward-18

01:00 Judy Moody And The Not Bummer Summer-PG

PARIAH ON OSN CINEMA 03:00 The Edge Of Love-PG15 05:00 Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2-PG 07:00 The Game Of Their Lives-PG15 09:00 Judy Moody And The Not Bummer Summer-PG 11:00 No Surrender-PG15 13:00 Black Forest-PG15 15:00 Win Win-PG15 17:00 When Love Is Not EnoughPG15 18:45 The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel-PG15 21:00 The Rum Diary-18 23:00 Pariah-18

01:30 Saturday Night Live 02:30 It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia 03:00 Louie 03:30 Happy Endings 04:00 Til Death 04:30 The Tonight Show With Jay Leno 05:30 Hope & Faith 06:30 Less Than Perfect 07:00 Late Night With Jimmy Fallon 08:00 Til Death 08:30 Modern Family 09:00 Parks And Recreation 09:30 The Neighbors 10:00 The Office 10:30 Less Than Perfect 11:00 The Tonight Show With Jay Leno 12:30 Til Death 13:00 Hope & Faith 13:30 Less Than Perfect 14:00 Happy Endings 14:30 The Office 15:00 The Neighbors 17:00 Late Night With Jimmy Fallon 18:00 Hot In Cleveland 19:00 Two And A Half Men 19:30 The Office 20:00 The Cleveland Show 20:30 Breaking In 22:00 Saturday Night Live 23:00 It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia 23:30 The Cleveland Show

00:00 01:00 02:00 06:00 07:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 14:00 15:00 16:00 20:00 21:00 22:00

Criminal Minds The Mob Doctor Sons Of Anarchy Good Morning America The Practice Castle The Practice Criminal Minds The Mob Doctor Live Good Morning America Castle Eureka Grimm Scandal

00:00 01:00 02:00 06:00 08:00 14:00 15:00 18:00 20:00 21:00 22:00 23:00

C.S.I. New York Sons Of Anarchy The Mob Doctor C.S.I. New York Covert Affairs Covert Affairs C.S.I. New York Covert Affairs Eureka Grimm Scandal Damages

02:00 04:00 06:00 08:00 09:45 12:00 14:00 18:00 20:00 22:00

The Rite Riddles Of The Sphinx True Justice: Blood Alley Arctic Blast Boiler Room Carjacked Arctic Blast Carjacked The Thaw The Ward

00:00 02:00 04:00 06:00

The Janky Promoters-18 High Fidelity-PG15 Just Crazy Enough-PG15 A Heartbeat Away-PG15

08:00 Police Academy 6: City Under Siege-PG15 10:00 Scrooged-PG 12:00 Just Crazy Enough-PG15 14:00 Police Academy 7: Mission To Moscow-PG15 16:00 Scrooged-PG 18:00 The Decoy Bride-PG15 20:00 A Little Help-18 22:00 The Janky Promoters-18

01:30 The Wild Hunt-PG15 03:15 Munich-18 06:00 Ripley’s Game-PG15 08:00 Paws-PG 09:30 School Ties-PG15 11:15 Le Divorce-PG15 13:15 Roger And Me-PG15 14:45 School Ties-PG15 16:30 Honey 2-PG15 18:30 Catch Me If You Can-PG15 21:00 An Officer And A Gentleman18 23:15 Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid-PG

00:00 The Way Back-PG15 02:30 HappythankyoumorepleasePG15 05:00 Rising Stars-PG15 07:00 Winx-FAM 09:00 John Carter-PG15 11:15 Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes-PG15 13:00 Call Of The Wild-PG15 14:45 Stolen Lives-PG15 16:45 John Carter-PG15 19:00 In Time-PG15 21:00 Johnny English Reborn-PG15 23:00 Martha Marcy May Marlene18

01:00 02:45 04:30 06:00 08:00 10:00 11:30 13:00 14:30 16:00 18:00 20:00 22:00 23:30

Cher Ami Battle For Terra Horrid Henry Cher Ami The Happy Cricket Spooky Buddies Kung Fu Panda 2 Tom Tom & Nana Battle For Terra Quest For A Heart Spooky Buddies The Smurfs Tom Tom & Nana Quest For A Heart

00:00 Crisis Point-PG15 01:45 Captain America: The First Avenger-PG15 04:00 The Pirates! Band Of MisfitsPG 06:00 The Conspirator-PG15 08:00 Jesse Stone: Innocents LostPG15 10:00 Fat Albert-PG 11:45 Captain America: The First Avenger-PG15 14:00 The Phantom Of The Opera At The Royal Albert Hall-PG15 16:45 Jesse Stone: Innocents LostPG15 18:15 Coriolanus-PG15 20:15 What’s Your Number?-PG15 22:00 Shadows & Lies-18

00:00 02:00 04:00 05:30 06:00 08:00 10:00 10:30 12:30 13:00 17:30 19:30

Live Champions Tour Super Rugby NRL Premiership ICC Cricket 360 Live NRL Premiership Live Super Rugby Futbol Mundial Live NRL Premiership ICC Cricket 360 PGA European Tour Super Rugby Live PGA Tour

01:00 Futbol Mundial 01:30 AFL Premiership

04:00 Series 18:30 19:00 20:30 21:15 23:15

Live HSBC Sevens World

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00:45 Courage Of Lassie-FAM 02:15 Beau Brummell-PG 04:10 Father Of The Bride-FAM 05:40 The V.I.P.S-FAM 08:00 Operation Crossbow-PG 10:00 Our Vines Have Tender Grapes-FAM 11:45 Seven Days In May-FAM 13:40 The Roaring Twenties-PG 15:40 Somebody Up There Likes Me-PG 18:00 3 Godfathers-FAM 19:45 The Scapegoat-PG 21:25 Rich, Young And Pretty-FAM 23:00 Our Mother’s House-PG

00:00 00:30 01:00 02:00 02:30 03:00 03:30 04:00 05:30 06:00 06:30 07:30 08:00 08:30 09:00 09:30 10:00 10:30 11:00 11:30 12:00 12:30 13:00 13:30 14:00 15:00 16:00 17:00 17:30 18:00 18:30 19:00 19:30 20:00 20:30 21:00 22:00 23:00

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Classifieds SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

Kuwait SHARQIA-1 LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) SIDE EFFECTS (DIG) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) TRUTH OR DARE (DIG) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) TRUTH OR DARE (DIG) SIDE EFFECTS (DIG) SHARQIA-2 THE CROODS (DIG-3D) THE CROODS (DIG-3D) THE CROODS (DIG-3D) THE CROODS (DIG-3D) JACK THE GIANT SLAYER (DIG-3D) JACK THE GIANT SLAYER (DIG-3D) SHARQIA-3 OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG) OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG) AL HAFLA (DIG) OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG) AL HAFLA (DIG) OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG) MUHALAB-1 LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) TRUTH OR DARE (DIG) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) TRUTH OR DARE (DIG) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) TRUTH OR DARE (DIG) MUHALAB-2 OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG) OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG) OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG) AL HAFLA (DIG) OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG) OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG)

12:30 PM 2:30 PM 4:45 PM 6:45 PM 8:45 PM 10:45 PM 12:45 AM 1:30 PM 3:30 PM 5:30 PM 8:00 PM 10:00 PM 12:15 AM 12:45 PM 3:00 PM 5:15 PM 7:30 PM 9:45 PM 12:05 AM 12:45 PM 4:30 PM 5:00 PM 7:00 PM 9:00 PM 11:00 PM 1:00 AM 1:00 PM 3:30 PM 6:00 PM 8:15 PM 10:30 PM 12:45 AM

MUHALAB-3 THE CROODS (DIG-3D) THE CROODS (DIG-3D) THE CROODS (DIG-3D) OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL (DIG-3D) JACK THE GIANT SLAYER (DIG-3D) JACK THE GIANT SLAYER (DIG-3D)

1:45 PM 3:45 PM 5:45 PM 7:45 PM 10:15 PM 12:30 AM

FANAR-1 OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG) TRUTH OR DARE (DIG) OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG) OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG) OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG) TRUTH OR DARE (DIG)

1:45 PM 4:00 PM 6:00 PM 8:15 PM 10:15 PM 12:30 AM

FANAR-2 LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) SIDE EFFECTS (DIG) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) SIDE EFFECTS (DIG) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) FANAR-3 SNITCH (DIG) AL HAFLA (DIG) SNITCH (DIG) AL HAFLA (DIG) AL HAFLA (DIG) SNITCH (DIG) MARINA-1 LOVE AND HONOR (DIG)

2:15 PM 4:15 PM 6:15 PM 8:30 PM 10:30 PM 12:45 AM 1:00 PM 3:30 PM 5:30 PM 7:45 PM 10:00 PM 12:15 AM 1:00 PM

KNCC PROGRAMME FROM THURSDAY TO WEDNESDAY (21/03/2013 TO 27/03/2013) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) TRUTH OR DARE (DIG) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) TRUTH OR DARE (DIG) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) TRUTH OR DARE (DIG)

3:00 PM 5:00 PM 7:00 PM 9:00 PM 11:00 PM 1:00 AM

MARINA-2 OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG) OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG) AL HAFLA (DIG) OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG) AL HAFLA (DIG) OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG)

1:15 PM 3:45 PM 6:00 PM 8:15 PM 10:30 PM 12:45 AM

MARINA-3 THE CROODS (DIG-3D) JACK THE GIANT SLAYER (DIG-3D) THE CROODS (DIG-3D) THE CROODS (DIG-3D) JACK THE GIANT SLAYER (DIG-3D) JACK THE GIANT SLAYER (DIG-3D) AVENUES-1 TRUTH OR DARE (DIG) TRUTH OR DARE (DIG) TRUTH OR DARE (DIG) TRUTH OR DARE (DIG) TRUTH OR DARE (DIG) TRUTH OR DARE (DIG) TRUTH OR DARE (DIG)

1:30 PM 3:30 PM 6:00 PM 8:00 PM 10:00 PM 12:15 AM 12:45 PM 2:45 PM 4:45 PM 6:45 PM 8:45 PM 11:00 PM 1:15 AM

AVENUES-2 LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG)

1:45 PM 3:45 PM 5:45 PM 7:45 PM 9:45 PM 11:45 PM

AVENUES-3 JACK THE GIANT SLAYER (DIG-3D) JACK THE GIANT SLAYER (DIG-3D) JACK THE GIANT SLAYER (DIG-3D) JACK THE GIANT SLAYER (DIG-3D) JACK THE GIANT SLAYER (DIG-3D)

2:00 PM 4:30 PM 7:00 PM 9:30 PM 12:05 AM

360º- 1 THE CROODS (DIG-3D) THE CROODS (DIG-3D) THE CROODS (DIG-3D) THE CROODS (DIG-3D) THE CROODS (DIG-3D) THE CROODS (DIG-3D)

1:00 PM 3:00 PM 5:00 PM 7:00 PM 9:00 PM 11:00 PM

360º- 2 AL HAFLA (DIG) AL HAFLA (DIG) AL HAFLA (DIG) AL HAFLA (DIG) AL HAFLA (DIG) AL HAFLA (DIG)

1:15 PM 3:30 PM 5:45 PM 8:00 PM 10:15 PM 12:30 AM

360º- 3 LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) NO SUN+ TUE+WED

12:45 PM 2:45 PM 4:45 PM 6:45 PM 8:45 PM 10:45 PM 12:45 AM

AL-KOUT.1 THE CROODS (DIG-3D) 1:45 PM OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL (DIG-3D) 3:45 PM

THE CROODS (DIG-3D) THE CROODS (DIG-3D) JACK THE GIANT SLAYER (DIG-3D) JACK THE GIANT SLAYER (DIG-3D)

6:15 PM 8:15 PM 10:15 PM 12:30 AM

AL-KOUT.2 OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG) OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG) SNITCH (DIG) OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG) OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG) OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG)

12:45 PM 3:00 PM 5:15 PM 7:30 PM 9:45 PM 12:05 AM

AL-KOUT.3 LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) AL HAFLA (DIG) AL HAFLA (DIG) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG)

12:30 PM 2:30 PM 4:30 PM 6:30 PM 8:30 PM 10:45 PM 12:45 AM

BAIRAQ-1 THE CROODS (DIG-3D) THE CROODS (DIG-3D) THE CROODS (DIG-3D) THE CROODS (DIG-3D) JACK THE GIANT SLAYER (DIG-3D) JACK THE GIANT SLAYER (DIG-3D)

1:30 PM 3:30 PM 5:30 PM 7:30 PM 9:30 PM 11:45 PM

BAIRAQ-2 OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG) OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG) OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG) AL HAFLA (DIG) OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG) OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG)

12:45 PM 3:00 PM 5:45 PM 8:00 PM 10:15 PM 12:45 AM

BAIRAQ-3 LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) TRUTH OR DARE (DIG) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) TRUTH OR DARE (DIG) LOVE AND HONOR (DIG) TRUTH OR DARE (DIG)

12:30 PM 2:30 PM 4:30 PM 6:30 PM 8:30 PM 10:30 PM 12:30 AM

MATRIMONIAL Proposals invited for a Marthomite girl, 25/160cms, B/B in Kuwait, Masters in Psychology from U.S.A. working in an international school as counselor. Invites proposals from God fearing well educated employed boys. Email: proposals0327@gmail.com (C 4348) 20-3-2013

PLAZA AL HAFLA (DIG) AL HAFLA (DIG) TRUTH OR DARE (DIG)

6:30 PM 8:30 PM 10:30 PM

SITUATION VACANT

LAILA OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG) JACK THE GIANT SLAYER (DIG) OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (DIG)

6:00 PM 8:15 PM 10:45 PM

AJIAL.1 LUCKY STAR (DIG) (MALAYALAM) LUCKY STAR (DIG) (MALAYALAM)

Kuwaiti family wishes to hire a housemaid for 3 months.

Contact: 99304076. (C 4351) 24-3-2013

6:00 PM 9:00 PM

AJIAL.2 RANGREZZ (DIG) (HINDI) RANGREZZ (DIG) (HINDI)

6:30 PM 9:30 PM

AJIAL.3 ITHU PATHIRAMANAL (DIG) (MALAYALAM)6:45 PM ITHU PATHIRAMANAL (DIG) (MALAYALAM)9:45 PM METRO-1 LUCKY STAR (DIG) (MALAYALAM) LUCKY STAR (DIG) (MALAYALAM)

A lady maid is needed to work in a part-time capaci-

ty for a single Arab/American male in an apartment located in Salmiya. Salar y is 60 KD/month. Working hours 12 PM to 6 PM, twice a week. Contact: 66417504.

(C 4349) 23-3-2013

LOST Original document policy No. 633000363, Maqsood Ali, 633000963 Abdul Rehman DV the State Life Insurance Corporation of Pakistan, Gulf Zone is reported to have been lost.

Anyone finding the same or claiming any interest in it should communicate with the Manager Kuwait State Life office - Ph: 22452208. (C 4350)

Prayer timings

Automated enquiry about the Civil ID card is

Fajr:

04:29

Shorook

05:48

1889988

Duhr:

11:54

Asr:

15:23

Maghrib:

18:01

Isha:

19:19

6:45 PM 9:45 PM

METRO-2 ITHU PATHIRAMANAL (DIG) (MALAYALAM)5:30 PM ITHU PATHIRAMANAL (DIG) (MALAYALAM)8:00 PM

112

DIAL 161 FOR AIRPORT INFORMATION

Airlines JAI THY JZR JZR QTR RJA ETH GFA UAE ETD FDB MSR QTR KAC CLX DHX THY JZR BAW KAC KAC FDB KAC KAC KAC KAC UAE ABY QTR FDB ETD GFA IRC IRA IRC JZR MEA MSR SYR UAE KAC KAC KAC FDB KAC KNE

Arrival Flights on Sunday 24/3/2013 Flt Route 574 MUMBAI 772 ISTANBUL 267 BEIRUT 539 CAIRO 148 DOHA 642 AMMAN 620 ADDIS ABABA 211 BAHRAIN 853 DUBAI 305 ABU DHABI 67 DUBAI 612 CAIRO 138 DOHA 544 CAIRO 792 LUXEMBOURG 170 BAHRAIN 770 ISTANBUL 555 ALEXANDRIA 157 LONDON 412 MANILA 206 ISLAMABAD 53 DUBAI 382 DELHI 302 MUMBAI 332 TRIVANDRUM 352 COCHIN 855 DUBAI 121 SHARJAH 132 DOHA 55 DUBAI 301 ABU DHABI 213 BAHRAIN 6507 SHIRAZ 603 SHIRAZ 6666 AHWAZ 165 DUBAI 404 BEIRUT 610 CAIRO 341 DAMASCUS 871 DUBAI 742 DAMMAM 284 DHAKA 774 RIYADH 57 DUBAI 672 DUBAI 472 JEDDAH

Time 00:05 00:35 00:45 00:50 01:00 01:10 01:45 01:50 02:35 02:45 03:05 03:10 03:45 04:20 04:55 05:15 05:30 06:00 06:40 06:45 07:40 07:45 07:45 07:55 08:15 08:25 08:40 09:05 09:10 09:15 09:20 09:55 10:30 10:40 11:10 11:20 11:55 12:45 12:50 12:50 12:55 12:55 13:30 13:50 14:10 14:15

SVA QTR JZR QTR UAE ETD RJA UAL GFA SVA JZR QTR ABY KAC JZR RBG KAC FDB AFG KAC KAC KAC KAC OMA KAC FDB JAI AXB MSR ABY QTR ALK MEA QTR GFA ETD UAE KAC JZR DHX FDB KAC KLM UAL AIC JZR KAC JZR DLH

500 140 561 134 857 303 640 982 215 510 777 144 127 542 177 3553 786 63 415 166 618 102 674 647 562 61 572 393 606 129 146 229 402 136 221 307 859 172 135 372 59 514 417 981 981 239 502 185 636

JEDDAH DOHA SOHAG DOHA DUBAI ABU DHABI AMMAN WASHINGTON DC DULLES BAHRAIN RIYADH JEDDAH DOHA SHARJAH CAIRO DUBAI ALEXANDRIA JEDDAH DUBAI KABUL PARIS DOHA NEW YORK DUBAI MUSCAT AMMAN DUBAI MUMBAI KOZHIKODE LUXOR SHARJAH DOHA COLOMBO BEIRUT DOHA BAHRAIN ABU DHABI DUBAI FRANKFURT BAHRAIN BAHRAIN DUBAI TEHRAN AMSTERDAM BAHRAIN CHENNAI AMMAN BEIRUT DUBAI FRANKFURT

14:30 14:35 14:50 15:30 16:40 16:50 16:55 17:10 17:15 17:20 17:45 17:50 17:55 18:05 18:15 18:20 18:30 18:45 19:00 19:10 19:20 19:35 19:35 19:55 19:55 20:00 20:10 20:15 20:25 20:35 20:45 20:55 21:20 21:25 21:30 21:35 21:40 21:45 21:50 22:00 22:00 22:00 22:05 22:25 22:30 22:45 23:00 23:05 23:55

Airlines AIC UAL KAC AXB DHX BBC JAI DLH ETH THY FDB UAE ETD MSR QTR QTR JZR GFA RJA THY CLX JZR FDB BAW KAC KAC ABY UAE KAC FDB KAC KAC ETD QTR GFA KAC IRC IRA IRC JZR KAC MEA KAC MSR SYR JZR UAE

Departure Flights on Sunday 24/3/2013 Flt Route 976 GOA/CHENNAI 981 WASHINGTON DC DULLES 283 DHAKA 390 MANGALORE 371 BAHRAIN 44 CHITTAGONG 573 MUMBAI 637 FRANKFURT 621 ADDIS ABABA 773 ISTANBUL 68 DUBAI 854 DUBAI 306 ABU DHABI 613 CAIRO 139 DOHA 149 DOHA 164 DUBAI 212 BAHRAIN 643 AMMAN 771 ISTANBUL 792 GIALAM 560 SOHAG 54 DUBAI 156 LONDON 171 FRANKFURT 671 DUBAI 122 SHARJAH 856 DUBAI 741 DAMMAM 56 DUBAI 117 NEW YORK 773 RIYADH 302 ABU DHABI 133 DOHA 214 BAHRAIN 541 CAIRO 6508 SHIRAZ 602 SHIRAZ 6667 AHWAZ 776 JEDDAH 103 LONDON 405 BEIRUT 785 JEDDAH 611 CAIRO 342 LATAKIA 176 DUBAI 872 DUBAI

Time 00:05 00:10 00:10 00:15 00:40 01:00 01:05 01:20 02:45 02:55 03:45 03:50 04:00 04:10 04:50 06:05 06:55 07:00 07:05 07:35 08:15 08:15 08:25 08:45 09:10 09:35 09:45 09:55 09:55 10:00 10:00 10:05 10:05 10:10 10:40 11:30 11:30 11:40 12:10 12:15 12:20 12:55 13:00 13:45 13:50 13:50 14:15

Directorate General of Civil Aviation Home Page (www.kuwait-airport.com.kw)

FDB KAC KAC KNE SVA KAC QTR KAC JZR ETD JZR KAC QTR UAE RJA GFA UAL JZR SVA ABY JZR QTR RBG JZR FDB AFG FDB OMA JAI AXB ABY MSR DHX ALK MEA ETD QTR GFA KAC FDB UAE KAC KAC DHX KLM QTR KAC JZR KAC KAC

58 561 673 473 503 617 141 501 238 304 538 513 135 858 641 216 982 184 511 128 266 145 3554 134 64 415 62 648 571 394 120 619 171 230 403 308 137 222 301 60 860 351 205 373 417 147 343 502 415 411

DUBAI AMMAN DUBAI JEDDAH MADINAH DOHA DOHA BEIRUT AMMAN ABU DHABI CAIRO IMAM KHOMEINI DOHA DUBAI AMMAN BAHRAIN BAHRAIN DUBAI RIYADH SHARJAH BEIRUT DOHA ALEXANDRIA BAHRAIN DUBAI JEDDAH DUBAI MUSCAT MUMBAI KOZHIKODE SHARJAH ALEXANDRIA BAHRAIN COLOMBO BEIRUT ABU DHABI DOHA BAHRAIN MUMBAI DUBAI DUBAI KOCHI ISLAMABAD BAHRAIN DAMMAM DOHA CHENNAI LUXOR KUALA LUMPUR BANGKOK

14:30 14:30 15:05 15:10 15:45 15:45 16:15 17:05 17:15 17:35 17:40 17:40 17:45 17:50 17:55 18:15 18:25 18:30 18:35 18:40 18:45 18:50 19:00 19:05 19:25 20:00 20:40 20:55 21:10 21:15 21:15 21:25 21:50 21:55 22:20 22:20 22:25 22:30 22:35 22:40 22:50 22:55 23:00 23:00 23:05 23:10 23:15 23:35 23:55 23:55

34

stars CROSSWORD 138

STAR TRACK Aries (March 21-April 19) It may be time to take a bit more control over an ongoing family issue that has got completely out of hand. Don’t wait around for this certain someone to dial your number - instead, muster up the courage to make the call. An unexpected email may create challenges for you. If you are looking for someone special to compliment your life and make long term goals with, the energy is out there for interesting encounters. Accept any offers for social gatherings that may come up and shine your shoes and take some breath mints with you as you’ll never know just who might show up to rock your world.

Taurus (April 20-May 20) You are best inclined to gather the fruits of the last couple of weeks and making the best of the harvest. Projects should have adequate input by now and be winding toward completion, filling in details for next two weeks. The crop is out, now it’s time to start tending to the harvest. Romance can become an end in itself for you now. It marks a time when love, creativity, and self-expression satisfy a deep yearning to be appreciated and admired, needed even. Be a bit flashy, with a splash of color and warmth, grab a rose or something bright to wear today! You just might get a bit more attention than what you are used to!

Gemini (May 21-June 20)

ACROSS 1. A decree that prohibits something.

4. A sweet cake flavored with sesame or caraway seeds and lemon.

12. What you can repeat immediately after perceiving it.

15. A loose sleeveless outer garment made from aba cloth.

16. Gum resin used especially in treating skin irritation.

17. A branch of the Tai languages.

18. An investment trust that owns and manages a pool of commercial properties and mortgages and other real estate asssets.

20. Being ten more than one hundred forty.

21. The head or top of a mast.

23. A state in the Rocky Mountains.

25. A public promotion of some product or service.

26. Inflammation of the ileum.

27. English theoretical physicist who applied relativity theory to quantum mechanics and predicted the existence of antimatter and the positron (1902-1984).

29. The sound of a bell rung slowly to announce a death or a funeral or the end of something v 1.

30. The blood group whose red cells carry both the A and B antigens.

32. The compass point that is one point east of northeast.

33. (trademark) Nylon fabric used as a fastening.

37. (informal) Exceptionally good.

42. (Assyrian) Chief god of the Assyrians.

43. The amount a salary is increased.

46. A dark-skinned member of a race of people living in Australia when Europeans arrived.

47. Relating to or containing the azo radical.

49. Fish with dorsoventrally flattened bodies.

52. A white or colorless vitreous insoluble solid (SiO2).

55. The largest city and principal port of New Zealand.

56. Leave or strike out, as of vowels.

58. A vehicle for carrying a coffin to a church or a cemetery.

59. The principal evil jinni in Islamic mythology.

61. A metric unit of length equal to 100 meters.

62. East Indian tree yielding a resin used medicinally and burned as incense.

65. The sixth month of the civil year.

69. Type genus of the Alcidae comprising solely the razorbill.

73. Easy to handle or use or manage.

75. The second largest state.

77. A river in north central Switzerland that runs northeast into the Rhine.

78. An agency of the United Nations affiliated with the World Bank.

79. Goat grass.

81. One of the most common of the five major classes of immunoglobulins.

82. A colloid in a more solid form than a sol.

83. In an advanced stage of pregnancy.

84. A young woman making her debut into society.

DOWN 1. Capital city of the Apulia region on the Adriatic coast.

2. In bed.

3. Submerged aquatic plant having narrow

leaves and small flowers.

4. A metallic element having four allotropic forms.

5. An international organization of European countries formed after World War II to reduce trade barriers and increase cooperation among its members.

6. Spin or twist together so as to form a cord.

7. A person who announces and plays popular recorded music.

8. A rotating disk shaped to convert circular into linear motion.

9. At full speed.

10. The third month of the civil year.

11. A genus of evergreen shrub that grows in New Zealand.

13. Of or relating to or characteristic of Thailand of its people.

14. A youth subculture that began in London in the early 1960s.

19. Any movable possession (especially articles of clothing).

22. Hilly land.

24. A metal-bearing mineral valuable enough to be mined.

28. The elementary stages of any subject (usually plural).

31. The largest Latin American country and the largest Portuguese speaking country in the world.

34. A cloth used as a head covering (and veil and shawl) by Muslim and Hindu women.

35. Prolific Flemish baroque painter.

36. Alloy of copper and tin and zinc.

38. Garlic mayonnaise.

39. A radioactive element of the actinide series.

40. Cubes of meat marinated and cooked on a skewer usually with vegetables.

41. Relatively small fast-moving sloth.

44. A white trivalent metallic element.

45. Make an etching of.

48. A soft silvery metallic element of the alkali earth group.

50. An endorsement.

51. Tropical American tree grown in southern United States having a whitish pink-tinged fruit.

53. Conforming to an ultimate standard of perfection or excellence.

54. All the New World monkeys except marmosets and tamarins.

57. Of or relating to the stomach and intestines.

60. French composer noted for his experimentalism and rejection of romanticism (1866-1925).

63. An officer who acts as military assistant to a more senior officer.

64. (archaic or Scottish) Faithful and true.

66. A shop selling delicatessen (as salads or cooked meats).

67. Long nerve fiber that conducts away from the cell body of the neuron.

68. Deeply moved.

70. Set down according to a plan.

71. An enclosure made or wire or metal bars in which birds or animals are kept.

72. An Arabic speaking person who lives in Arabia or North Africa.

74. A yearning for something or to do something.

76. The compass point midway between south and southeast.

80. 1,000,000,000 periods per second.

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

You can develop some new ideas and projects today that will be carried out in the near future. However, you should plan carefully and logically, so you won’t have to make endless revisions to your plans in the future. Don’t be hasty or things may backfire. Today is a day for you to be especially prudent in the choices you make. Try to find something mutually satisfying to do with a partner today. If you don’t have a partner at this time then you might want to consider putting yourself in some situations that could benefit you in finding one. A new social group, school, even one of those online dating services. You just never know where you might run into a potential keeper.

Cancer (June 21-July 22) During this time period, you feel like it is time to go for the gold?. You want to hit the jackpot, and you may find yourself walking with a little extra spring and bounce, and whistling zippity-doo-dah! This is, indeed, a time of opportunity and good times. However, you also tend to harbor unrealistic hopes, exaggerate the possibilities, and lack a sense of realism. If things seem to be running smoothly around you, they are, so let them. Emotions are strong and upbeat today. Any plans you begin today regarding a relationship will be firm and supportive and continue to evolve that way. Feelings of friendship and even love are at the top of the emotional list and it’s easy to see the good side of the people around you.

Leo (July 23-August 22) The everyday care of the smaller necessities in life are highlighted during this period. First, you may feel you are not getting your daily due and proper attention — but then you may discover it is because you haven’t really asked for what you truly want.

Learning new and more satisfying ways to address your personal habits and those of others will refresh once you take a closer look. It could be a little uncomfortable today as you may find yourself at odds with those around you or with your life situation regarding personal issues of great sensitivity. Difficulties, blocks, and all manner of annoying things may be discovered and have to be worked through before you find your comfort zone again.

Virgo (August 23-September 22) Before you get involved in something that’ll take a lot of time and energy, talk it over with your partner or someone you respect a great deal. Think about taking a short trip or staying with good friends, or simply to give yourself a break and work out some emotional confusion. There is a friendly, cooperative, harmonious tone to the interactions you have now. You avoid heavy discussions and do not want to focus on dry, practical matters. Reading light fiction, going out to see a romantic comedy, or simply sharing a pleasant time with someone you like is more in tune with your feelings now.

Word Search

Libra (September 23-October 22) The study of unusual subjects appeals to you at this stage in your life, and you could find that you have a certain amount of genius in some such things.

Curiosity is strong, and pays off in ways you’d never suspect. Writing or speaking about radical social or technological ideas catches your interest, and could get you lots of positive attention. A “high-tech” phase. Your home life should get the bulk of your attention at this time. Now is an excellent time to resolve any lingering conflicts with your personal relationships. Expressing your emotional and physical needs clearly to your mate should lead to a fulfilling affirmation of your love for one another and strengthen your sense of being a part of something special.

Scorpio (October 23-November 21) This is a time of serious thought and self-analysis regarding the direction of your life. You need some time alone to ponder your situation so that you can make wise decisions. You are also likely to feel the pressure of many obligations in your daily life.

Few doors may open for you now, but with some honest introspection that will change soon. Your desire for pleasure, ease, and affection is what today is about, and this may interfere with work or complicate situations in which you need to be acting assertively on your own behalf. Your mood and attitude is conciliatory, and your need for love and approval heightened. Social gatherings and personal relationships are favored.

Sagittarius (November 22-December 21) Everyone may want a piece of you today but not for the reasons you’d like. Some people must have someone to blame for their shortcomings, and if you’re in their line of sight it could be you. Try to concentrate on your priorities and don’t allow yourself to be baited into a confrontation. The best armor is to keep out of range today. Conflicts between duty and pleasure, or between sober practicality and a yearning for love and emotional satisfaction, are likely now. This can be a very frustrating time. A relationship may end or a temporary break may be made. This could be a time to relinquish something or someone you once cherished but which no longer has a positive purpose in your life.

Capricorn (December 22-January 19) You are very impatient, energetic, obstinate, and self-willed during this time period. Even if there is no specific deadline for a task, you work as if it must be completed with lightning speed. You love physical activity and adventure now. Your personal relationships of all kinds are likely to deepen at this time. Intimate communication is very good, and should lead to a deeper understanding and mutual appreciation between you and your mate. A little time spent deftly flirting and teasing is sure to lead to some splendid physical moments too.

Aquarius (January 20- February 18) Use some of that charm today as you’ll get farther than if you push your way into situations. This especially applies to love, but it also applies to any competitive interests - anything where you want to come out a winner. This is an excellent time to investigate a complex problem and also to learn more about your own inner self. This is a great day for heading off into unexplored territory, and you will find others are doing the same. Inventiveness and originality are favored, as are projects and personal involvements which partake of them. If you haven’t tried it then now’s the time to take a new adventure in life.

Pisces (February 19-March 20) If you act as if everything is going your way, it will. That’s because you’re looking good to others and the only way you could spoil it is to show lack of self-confidence. So if you don’t know it, don’t blow it - proceed as if everything is under control, because for the moment it more than likely is. You can run the show from the background, but don’t retreat too far or make the mistake of letting it pass you by. This is a period of critical decisions and transition. A major change in your life can occur now (ending a long-term relationship or beginning a new one, etc.. In fact, it is not unusual for several important changes of this nature to be occurring.

Yesterday’s Solution

Yesterday’s Solution

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Yesterday’s Solution

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

i n f o r m at i o n For labor-related inquiries and complaints: Call MSAL hotline 128 GOVERNORATE Sabah Hospital

24812000

Amiri Hospital

22450005

Maternity Hospital

24843100

Mubarak Al-Kabir Hospital

25312700

Chest Hospital

24849400

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24892010

Adan Hospital

23940620

Ibn Sina Hospital

24840300

Al-Razi Hospital

24846000

Physiotherapy Hospital

24874330/9

PHARMACY

ADDRESS

PHONE

Ahmadi

Sama Safwan Abu Halaifa Danat Al-Sultan

Fahaeel Makka St Abu Halaifa-Coastal Rd Mahboula Block 1, Coastal Rd

23915883 23715414 23726558

Jahra

Modern Jahra Madina Munawara

Jahra-Block 3 Lot 1 Jahra-Block 92

24575518 24566622

Capital

Ahlam Khaldiya Coop

Fahad Al-Salem St Khaldiya Coop

22436184 24833967

Farwaniya

New Shifa Ferdous Coop Modern Safwan

Farwaniya Block 40 Ferdous Coop Old Kheitan Block 11

24734000 24881201 24726638

Tariq Hana Ikhlas Hawally & Rawdha Ghadeer Kindy Ibn Al-Nafis Mishrif Coop Salwa Coop

Salmiya-Hamad Mubarak St Salmiya-Amman St Hawally-Beirut St Hawally & Rawdha Coop Jabriya-Block 1A Jabriya-Block 3B Salmiya-Hamad Mubarak St Mishrif Coop Salwa Coop

25726265 25647075 22625999 22564549 25340559 25326554 25721264 25380581 25628241

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22418714

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22545171

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24810598

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22545171

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24742838

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22434853

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22545051

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24711433

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24316983

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23927002

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24316983

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23980088

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23711183

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23262845

Kaizen center

25716707

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22517733

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22517144

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25610011

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24848075

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25616368

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24849807

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24848913

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24814507

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22549134

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22526804

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24814764

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22515088

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22532265

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22531908

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22518752

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22459381

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22451082

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22456536

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22465401

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25746401

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25316254

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25623444

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25388462

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25381200

W Hawally

22630786

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24810221

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24770319

New Jahra

24575755

West Jahra

24772608

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24775066

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24775992

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24311795

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24884079

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24892674

Omariya

24719048

N Khaitan

24710044

Fintas

23900322

INTERNATIONAL CALLS

PRIVATE CLINICS Ophthalmologists Dr. Abidallah Al-Mansoor 25622444 Dr. Samy Al-Rabeea 25752222 Dr. Masoma Habeeb 25321171 Dr. Mubarak Al-Ajmy 25739999 Dr. Mohsen Abel 25757700 Dr Adnan Hasan Alwayl 25732223 Dr. Abdallah Al-Baghly 25732223 Ear, Nose & Throat (ENT) Dr. Ahmed Fouad Mouner 24555050 Ext 510 Dr. Abdallah Al-Ali 25644660 Dr. Abd Al-Hameed Al-Taweel 25646478 Dr. Sanad Al-Fathalah 25311996 Dr. Mohammad Al-Daaory 25731988 Dr. Ismail Al-Fodary 22620166 Dr. Mahmoud Al-Booz 25651426 General Practitioners Dr. Mohamme Y Majidi 24555050 Ext 123 Dr. Yousef Al-Omar 24719312 Dr. Tarek Al-Mikhazeem 23926920 Dr. Kathem Maarafi 25730465 Dr. Abdallah Ahmad Eyadah 25655528 Dr. Nabeel Al-Ayoobi 24577781 Dr. Dina Abidallah Al-Refae 25333501 Urologists Dr. Ali Naser Al-Serfy 22641534 Dr. Fawzi Taher Abul 22639955 Dr. Khaleel Abidallah Al-Awadi 22616660 Dr. Adel Al-Hunayan FRCS (C) 25313120 Dr. Leons Joseph 66703427 Psychologists /Psychotherapists

Paediatricians

Plastic Surgeons Dr. Mohammad Al-Khalaf

22547272

Dr. Khaled Hamadi

Dr. Abdal-Redha Lari

22617700

Dr. Abd Al-Aziz Al-Rashed

Dr. Abdel Quttainah

25625030/60

Family Doctor Dr Divya Damodar

23729596/23729581

Psychiatrists Dr. Esam Al-Ansari

22635047

Dr Eisa M. Al-Balhan

22613623/0

Gynaecologists & Obstetricians DrAdrian arbe

23729596/23729581

Dr. Verginia s.Marin

2572-6666 ext 8321

Endocrinologist

25665898 25340300

Dr. Zahra Qabazard

25710444

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22621099

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25713514

Dr. Pradip Gujare

23713100

Dr. Zacharias Mathew

24334282

(1) Ear, Nose and Throat (2) Plastic Surgeon Dr. Abdul Mohsin Jafar, FRCS (Canada)

25655535

Dentists

Dr. Fozeya Ali Al-Qatan

22655539

Dr. Majeda Khalefa Aliytami

25343406

Dr. Shamah Al-Matar

22641071/2

Dr. Ahmad Al-Khooly

25739272

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22562226

22618787

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22561444

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22619557

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22525888

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25653755

Dr. Bader Al-Ansari

25620111

General Surgeons Dr. Amer Zawaz Al-Amer

22610044

Dr. Mohammad Yousef Basher

25327148

Internists, Chest & Heart Dr. Adnan Ebil Dr. Latefa Al-Duweisan

22666300 25728004

Dr. Nadem Al-Ghabra

25355515

Dr. Mobarak Aldoub

24726446

Dr Nasser Behbehani

25654300/3

Soor Center Tel: 2290-1677 Fax: 2290 1688

Neurologists

22639939

Dr. Mousa Khadada

info@soorcenter.com www.soorcenter.com

3729596/3729581

Dr. Sohal Najem Al-Shemeri

25633324

Dr. Jasem Mola Hassan

25345875

Gastrologists Dr. Sami Aman

22636464

Dr. Mohammad Al-Shamaly

25322030

Dr. Foad Abidallah Al-Ali

22633135

Kaizen center 25716707

25339330

Dr. Ahmad Al-Ansari 25658888 Dr. Kamal Al-Shomr 25329924 Physiotherapists & VD Dr. Deyaa Shehab

25722291

Dr. Musaed Faraj Khamees

22666288

Rheumatologists: Dr. Adel Al-Awadi

Dr Anil Thomas

Dr. Salem soso

Dr. Abd Al-Naser Al-Othman

25330060

Dr. Khaled Al-Jarallah

25722290

Internist, Chest & Heart DR.Mohammes Akkad

24555050 Ext 210

Dr. Mohammad Zubaid MB, ChB, FRCPC, PACC Assistant Professor Of Medicine Head, Division of Cardiology Mubarak Al-Kabeer Hospital Consultant Cardiologist Dr. Farida Al-Habib MD, PH.D, FACC Inaya German Medical Center Te: 2575077 Fax: 25723123

2611555-2622555

William Schuilenberg, RPC 2290-1677 Zaina Al Zabin, M.Sc. 2290-1677

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36

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

LIFESTYLE G o s s i p

Holly Madison wants to get married in August

T

he former ‘Girls Next Door’ star and fiance Pasquale Rotella - with who she has two-week-old daughter Rainbow Aurora - want to tie the knot later this year, and though they haven’t set a date yet, Holly knows when she wants the nuptials to take place. She said: “We’re thinking about August. We haven’t settled on a date yet, but I’m slowly pulling the wedding together. Our first priority was to pop out the baby and move into our house and we’re not quite settled.” While the couple are adjusting to life with a new baby, Holly doesn’t mind when her daughter screams or won’t sleep because she is so “cute”. She added to In Touch magazine: “She’s been smiling a lot and making a lot of cute faces. Like all babies she has her moments. But I’m so in awe of her that I even think her screams are cute! “The first few nights Rainbow wouldn’t sleep at all.

But now she’s staying down for four hours at a time. Who knew I’d be so excited to sleep for four hours?”

Vanessa Hudgens is obsessed with Italy

T

he ‘Spring Breakers’ actress loves the “magical city” of Rome and can’t resist the food in the Italian city. She told People magazine: “The last country I visited was Italy. I think [Rome] is the most magical city in the world. The food is to die for. I’m a foodie with a bottomless stomach, so I went crazy.” The 24-year-old actress - who stars in raunchy college movie ‘Spring Breakers’ - shot to fame portraying Gabriella Montez in the ‘High School Musical’ trilogy but recently admitted she is happy to leave her squeaky clean alter-ego behind. She said: “For a while I was kind of struggling and fighting for these roles that I just desperately wanted. It was hard and it was a struggle, but then again life is always a struggle.

“Having a career will always be a struggle.

You’ll always have to fight for what you want. Definitely crossing over and being able to tackle these grittier parts was a challenge, but I feel like I’ve done it! It’s a whole new chapter!”

Ashley Greene’s dog dies in blaze A

shley Greene’s dog died when her apartment went up in flames on Friday. The ‘Twilight Saga’ actress’ home in a Los Angeles apartment block caught fire with her two dogs inside and while firefighters were able to rescue one of her fox terriers, the other one didn’t make it, according to People magazine. The 26-year-old actress’ representative said the cause of the fire is as yet “undetermined”.

Los Angeles Fire Department Inspector Johnson told RadarOnline: “We made an aggressive fire attack. Our team saw smoke and fire coming from the third floor. “We have reports of two patrons that were burned, so they were treated by the para-

medics and sent to the hospital.” 10 fire trucks were called to the scene of the seven-story building. It was recently reported that Ashley is dating Ryan Phillippe after the pair were spotted leaving LA club Vignette Lounge together. The 26-year-old actress - who has previously dated Joe Jonas and Chace Crawford - previously admitted she struggles to find a relationship because of the nature of the industry, and sometimes thinks moving back to Florida would be her best option. She said: “Dating is a hard, hard thing when you have this job. “Sometimes I wish I could just go back to Florida and, like, date my hometown boyfriend.”

Josh Duhamel hints Fergie expecting a son

T

One Direction forced into healthy eating regime

T

he ‘Little Things’ pop stars have reportedly been assigned full-time private chef Sarah Nicholas to help get more fruit and vegetables into their systems. A source told the Daily Mirror newspaper: “Sarah worked with the guys on their last tour and became like a surrogate mum for them all, particularly Harry [Styles]. “She tries to offer the boys their favourite foods but healthier versions of them, using natural, often organic ingredients.

They particularly like Mexican food.” The switch comes with the boy band’s “hectic” touring schedule meaning they need to start eating more nutritious meals to stay fit and

healthy. The insider added: “With 1D’s hectic schedule and gruelling lifestyles, it’s essential they eat properly and start looking after themselves. “This basically means Sarah has been charged with getting more fruit and veg down them, and staving off colds as much as possible. They’re currently drinking loads of smoothies.” The heart throbs recently discussed other dinner plans as Louis Tomlinson revealed David Beckham is his ideal party guest. He said: “I would have Natalie Portman because you need someone fit and maybe David Beckham, because I’ve always wanted to meet him. Lastly, my grandad Len ... yeah.”

Justin Timberlake is in talks to host Oscars in 2014

T

he singer-and-actor is being considered to host next year’s Academy Awards after impressing producers during his latest stint as a host on comedy sketch show, ‘Saturday Night Live’. A source told the National Enquirer magazine: “The Oscar honchos are in discussions with Mr SexyBack already. Getting Justin to host would now be a huge coup for the Oscars. He’d been considered before, but they always thought he was too young and not seasoned enough.” “Now, he’s the frontrunner for the job after showing he knows how to sing, dance, host, and improvise on the spot.” The ‘Mirrors’ hitmaker - who hosted ‘Saturday Night Live’ for a fifth time earlier this month - was applauded by critics for his latest stint on the show, and the episode logged its best ratings for over a year with 8.4 million viewers tuning in.

Justin, 32, would follow in the footsteps of comedian Seth MacFarlane, who hosted the 2013 Oscars ceremony last month and polarised audiences. The ‘Ted’ director was criticised for his risquÈ jokes and mischievous song-and-dance numbers. However, many were also supportive of Seth’s performance and praised him for his daring jokes. One filmmaker said: “I don’t blame Seth. He basically did his stock and trade.

Why hire the guy if you didn’t want his brand of humour? I actually thought, as a fan of ‘Family Guy,’ that he was pretty restrained.” —Bangshowbiz

he ‘Safe House’ star and his Black Eyed Peas star wife have yet to confirm their unborn child’s sex, but Josh referred to looking after a boy when talking about childproofing their home. He said: “You know your kid is going to get... He’s going to fall and bump his head.

And he’s going to do all of those things. But that to me is going to be the hardest thing.” Josh, who is hosting the Kids’ Choice Awards in Los Angeles’, recently admitted he feels the timing is right for he and the Black Eyed Peas singer to have kids as they feel much “wiser” than when they first wed in 2009. He explained: “Now I get to relive my youth through my child and see my child live all that. So everybody’s got a different path. “I wouldn’t change anything. We’re completely happy. We’re much wiser than we were 10 years ago. We’re much more ready. I think we’re so strong as a couple and all of those things are really important when you bring a little one into the world.” Fergie, 37, is extremely excited about becoming a mother, despite feeling unprepared.

She admitted: “We’re thrilled. I know that my husband told everybody what I said. My quote when we found out - ‘This just got real.’ “But it’s true, when that moment occurs to you, there’s going to be a human being growing inside of you. It’s reality. It’s amazing, we’re thrilled. “I have no idea what I’m doing! I’m just going to play it by ear and see how things go, and let the natural instincts kick in.”

Diane Kruger can’t imagine a normal relationship

T

he German actress has been with Joshua Jackson for seven years but their busy acting schedules makes it virtually impossible for them to live together for long periods of time. Diane told Gala Magazine: “It’s pretty difficult to be my boyfriend. There’s so much going on in my life, I’m always flying around the world.” The blonde model and ‘Dawson’s Creek’ star Joshua share residences in both Paris and Vancouver but it’s only now Joshua has finished filming for ‘Fringe’ that they can begin a “new relationship.” She said: “I have always had long-distance relationship therefore I can’t imagine having a normal relationship. Now he is finally coming home and our new life is starting. It is like a new relationship because we will be really living together for the first time. I’m excited to see how that goes in our daily life.” Despite being well known across Europe, the 36year-old still feels envious by the female attention Joshua gets in the US. She added: “You can’t imagine how the girls are screaming when they see him. I sometimes don’t like that at all.” Diane is next in sci-fi film ‘The Host’, which will be released next week.

37

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

LIFESTYLE

Popcorn with a movie?

Try truffles and foie gras

T

here’s popcorn and movies, there’s the infamous frozen TV dinner, and then, in one corner of New York, there’s getting a top chef to feed you delicacies that echo the story unfolding on the big screen. Old fashioned junk food won’t cut the moviegoer’s mustard in the hipster hotbed of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. At a screening this week of hit French film “Amelie,” the mere whiff of processed cheese and nachos would have been sacrilege. Patrons at the Nitehawk Cinema tucked into five courses of classic French fare, kicking off with a mushroom-and-black-truffle-laced Croque Madame.

Far from slurping on the monster sodas so beloved in US theaters-and targeted for a ban by New York’s health-conscious mayor-moviegoers washed down their starter with a glass of prosecco. “It changes the game,” said Amy Wilkinson, a 33year-old bartender and make-up artist, as she eased into one of the 60 seats, each of which had a small table attached. “It heightens the senses.”

Nitehawk has pioneered the foodie-movie in the Big Apple since 2011, when New York State overturned a Prohibition-era ban on liquor in theaters. This year the cinema launched a program of high-end evenings where celebrity chefs choose the movie and menu. In other parts of the United States the eatwhile-you-watch concept is already thriving-and helping to breathe life into an increasingly outmoded cinema industry, said Ross Melnick, assistant professor of film and media studies at UC Santa Barbara.

“Today we have great big TVs, we have iPhones and laptops and thousands of distractions. People have stopped going to the movies as an activity as we once did,” he said. But now “there have been a number of companies who have figured out how to make movie-going into an event.” Some, like the Alamo Drafthouse chain, produce entire movie-themed evenings. Others concentrate on a more epicurean formula, Nitehawk-style. But even a mega chain like AMC has started to serve food in some of its theaters.

“They’re getting people to stop thinking of the movie theater as a kind of blank space,” Ross said.

Nitehawk event director Julia Schweizer said the aim of the new gourmet nights, which cost around $95 a head, is not to reenact the movie, but to play around its edges.

For “Amelie,” they brought in chef Sara Nguyen. Last month, at the inaugural event, the audience munched on 1980s dishes prepared by a top chef who picked the seemingly less-than-appetizing “American Psycho,” about a homicidal, sexcrazed Wall Street banker.

Nitehawk also has regular evenings, where less sophisticated menus, and even a rather fancy version of popcorn, are offered. So do people come for the film or the food? “You say tom-ay-to, I say toma-to,” Schweizer answered. “Doing these sorts of dinners, it’s marrying the two things.” The “Amelie” experience began with a pre-show crash course in French slang known as “verlan.”

“Linguists go to the ghettos to study this all the time. They love it,” the young teacher, sporting the beard that is de rigeur among Brooklyn hipsters, explained to a group sipping on Hollywoodinspired cocktails. Nguyen briefly popped from the kitchen to greet theatergoers, telling them they were about to watch “my favorite movie.”

Then finally the lights dimmed.

Black-clad waiters served course after course, drink after drink.

Moving as stealthily as stage hands on a set change, they rarely disrupted the film, in which Audrey Tautou’s winsome heroine Amelie dashes through a series of archetypally Gallic scenes.

The prosecco arrived just as the movie showed glasses shaking on a table. The first course coincided with an early key plot twist that sets up Amelie’s fate. The food-moules, a foie gras and duck crepe-kept on coming, right up to angel food cake with plum jam and Pernod cream, which referenced Amelie’s own plum cake. “Amelie” is a renowned feel-good movie, but half a dozen strong drinks and fine food will take feeling good to a whole new level.

As the credits rolled, the audience burst into applause. “A lot of people feel a movie is what you watch, but here a chef was bringing out your senses,” said Christian Ling, 25, a Boston law student who came on a romantic evening out with his girlfriend. —AFP

Devika as Kannaki, the vengeful heroine of the Tamil literary epic Chilappathikaram.

Devika shows the symbol of the blazing sun.

Swindling Methil Devika performs Mohiniyattam at Jabriya Medical Association Hall, Thursday March 21 in a program organized by Upasana dance School, Kuwait.

Spirituality in serene steps Dance scholar-performer Methil Devika takes freedom to create new symbols

By Sunil Cherian

E

xpect this beautiful danseuse to sensually evoke you while she is performing Mohiniyattam (a 16th century originated Indian classical dance, literally the dance of Mohini the seductress), you will come away a changed person. Even the Radha-Krishna amorousness, Methil Devika, a rare blend of beauty and brains, an MBA holder in marketing and a Ph D fellow in Mohiniyattam, believes it is spiritual, not sensual. Her performance last Thursday at Jabriya Medical Association hall had a bonus feature at the end of the show when she was ready, though panting, to answer a few questions from the audience. To one question, what would be the most important tip on learning dance, 36-yearold Devika said: having a guru. And guru can be your friends, foes anything.

Friends and well-wishers of Upasana Dance School, the organizers and other dance enthusiasts joined hands in applauding Devika who enigmatically shifted from Sri Krishna’s mother to the vengeful Kannaki, and finally to the agony aunt of classical dance forms.

“I dig deep into the mudras (hand gestures) which have roots in Tantric mudras, Natyasasthram and Hindu upper caste feudal maneuvers”, Devika said when I met her a day after her performance. “Once you know the roots”, she said, “You have the base to stretch from. And I don’t mind creating new mudras. For example, left hand held par-

allel to the body means straightforward things. When the right hand is shown cutting the left hand, it means deceit.

right hand to state an under the table affair; right hand over the left hand, an over the top gain. I could decode 80 per-

Peacock This gives you the freedom to show the right hand moving under the straight

cent of hand symbols detailed in Hastha Lakshana Deepika, the book where the

symbols are taken from”. The dancer generously posed showing her graceful mudras before the cameraman KK Shemejkumar.

For Devika, Krishna is just a passion.

These purana stories are there for the common man to comprehend the abstract concepts or darshanas. Krishna tells a gopika, a cow-herd girl whose love for Krishna is misunderstood: reach me through your mundane household chores. There is no escape from everyday realities. One of Devika’s beloved dance themes is encounters with the spirit. She dares to blend themes like conversations with the celestial beings in Mohiniyattam that was once considered taboo because of its ‘sexclusive’ elements.

In her new dance theme, tentatively titled ‘The Night Siddartha Leaves’, Devika explores the coward common man in search of meaning in Siddartha the prince before he became the enlightened Buddha. “I give certain suggestions; the rest is with the audience to fill up. My contribution to dance is my teaching methodology”, said Devika who runs Sreepada Natyakalari dance school in Palakkad, Kerala, where students range from 2-year olds to 80-year olds.

Devika who was born and brought up in Dubai until class 7 was a star performer in her college days. She joined Soorya TV as a producer after taking MBA from Madras University but dropped it in pursuit of dance. When she wanted to do a Ph D in dance in late 90s, she was told to do a master degree

course in dance which Kerala had not heard of. She went to Rabindra Bharathi University, Calcutta. (The study center, Thakur Badi, the house of Thakur was the original home of Rabindranath Tagore, the Thakur or the lord class). She took MA in Kuchipudi and later drew herself to Mohiniyattam, ‘because it gives me a chance to promote own culture’. Her Kannaki’s music was by Kavalam Narayana Panikkar. “I also compose music whenever I feel the traditional Carnatic music is not in sync with the steps”, Devika said.

Devika’s PhD, ‘Semiotic Study of Symbols in Mohiniyattam’, submitted two months ago at Bharathidasan University, Trichy, was under a catholic Jesuit priest, Dr Saju George who runs Art Ashram in Calcutta. But crossing the cultural barriers is not new to Devika who has Kuchipudi-performed crucifixion and the Last Supper. She was offered the role of a dancer in the Malayalam film Kochu Kochu Santhoshangal but declined it for dance studies. Last year she choreographed a song sequence in the movie Karmayogi. Her stint with cinema was earlier evoked when her uncle, Maythil Radhakrishnan, celebrated writer had a plan to film Chilappathikaram, the Kannaki story which did not take off.

Yesterday and on Friday, Devika gave workshops on dance for the public and for Upasana students. “Devika has given us a great mileage”, Upasana’s Murali and Prathibha said.

Mexico demands Sotheby’s halt auction of artifacts

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he Mexican government is demanding that Sotheby’s auction house halt the planned sale of 51 pre-Columbian Mexican artifacts, arguing they are protected national historical pieces. The National Institute of Anthropology and History said Wednesday that Mexico has sent a diplomatic note to the French government seeking assistance in heading off the auction scheduled in Paris for Friday and yesterday. It also implied that some of the artifacts offered in what is known as the 300-piece Barbier-Mueller Collection of Pre-Columbian Art are fakes or imitations.

“Of the 130 objects advertised as being from Mexico, 51 are archaeological artifacts that are (Mexican) national property, and the rest are handicrafts,” the institute said in a statement. Still, the genuine pieces are important to Mexico. “In light of their importance for the people of Mexico, the director of the auction company has been asked to withdraw the pieces from sale,” the institute said. Sotheby’s issued a statement Thursday saying it “has had dialogue with several nations and given careful consideration to their concerns about this sale, and we continue to welcome discussion regarding any new information on specific issues.”

The auction house said that over six months, it “thoroughly researched the provenance of this collection and we are confident in offering these works for auction.” Sophie Dufresne, Sotheby’s spokeswoman in Paris, said: “The sale is going forward as planned.” A description of the pieces listed on Sotheby’s Paris website describes the collection as containing pre-Hispanic sculptures in wood and stone, ceramics, textiles and ritual objects from Mexico, Central America and South America, saying the collection is “representative of all the leading pre-Columbian cultures.”

The Sotheby’s website says the collection was started by Josef Mueller in 1920. “He became

attracted by important works of pre-Columbian art, his first purchase being an Aztec ‘water goddess’ in Paris in 1920,” it says. The description says Mueller’s son-in-law, Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller, augmented and broadened the collection. While Sotheby’s described Barbier-Mueller as “a great aesthete and man of culture,” Mexico said such collections trivialize archaeological pieces.

“The Mexican government has consistently expressed its objections to the international trade in protected cultural objects, particularly archaeological artifacts, and stresses that such practices strip these unique objects of their invaluable cultural, historical and symbolic essence, converting them into mere merchandise and curios,” the institute said.

Under a 1972 law, Mexico prohibited the purchase and sale of archaeological pieces, but allowed some previously existing collections to remain in private hands if they were registered with the government. While the French collection may have been assembled prior to that time, Mexico has had laws prohibiting the export of such artifacts since at least 1827. Photos of the artifacts on the Sotheby’s site show two seated depictions of godlike figures carved in stone that appear to come from Mexican pre-Hispanic cultures. The description says the collection contains Aztec, Mayan and Tarascan pieces.

A French diplomatic official said that nothing in the collection up for auction is on the French database checked by the Central Office of Cultural Property. Nor are any of the items in the Interpol database or on the “red list” of the International Council of Museums for cultural property of Central America and Mexico. The diplomatic official, who was not authorized to speak publicly and asked not to be named, said these objects have often been shown publicly and mentioned in various catalogues since September. —AP

This file photo combo shows the Eastern State Penitentiary (bottom) and an image released by Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site of the penitentiary during the1920’s (top). —AP

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

lifestyle

Models present creations for FACETASM during the fall/winter 2013-14 presentation at Tokyo Fashion Week yesterday. — AFP

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igerian author Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani was just 10 years old when she first read Chinua Achebe’s groundbreaking novel “Things Fall Apart.” She devoured the rich use of Igbo proverbs in his book, which forever changed Africa’s portrayal in literature. That inspiration carried over into the creation of a pivotal character in her debut work, “I Do Not Come to You by Chance,” which pulls readers into the dark and greedy world of Nigerian Internet scam artists.

“Like many contemporary Nigerian writers, I grew up on a literary diet that comprised a huge dose of Achebe’s works,” she said. “My parents were so proud of his accomplishments, and quoted the Igbo proverbs in his books almost as frequently as they quoted Shakespeare.” Achebe’s death at the age of 82 was announced Friday by his publisher. His works inspired countless writers around the world, though the literary style of “Things Fall Apart,” first published in 1958, particularly transformed the way novelists wrote about Africa.

Adewale Maja-Pearce, a literary critic who succeeded Achebe as the editor of Heinemann’s African Writers Series,

called him a pioneer whose “contribution is immeasurable.” In breaking with the Eurocentric lens of viewing the continent through the eyes of outsiders, Achebe took readers to a place full of complex characters who told their stories in their own words and style. Achebe once wrote that a major goal “was to challenge stereotypes, myths, and the image of ourselves and our continent.” He resisted the idea that he was the father of modern African literature, recalling a rich and ancient tradition of storytelling on the continent. Still, his influence on younger writers of the late 20th and early 21st century, particularly those from his homeland, was undeniable. “Achebe’s influence has been completely seminal and inspirational, and there are writers that have been called the School of Achebe who have imitated his style,” said Chukwuma Azuonye, professor of African and African Diaspora Literatures at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.

A newer crop of successful novelists with ties to Nigeria has broken away from Achebe’s mode, Azuonye said, developing their own modernist style of writing that focuses on clashes of

cultures and other issues facing Nigerians abroad. Among those influenced by Achebe was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who won the Orange Prize for Fiction for “Half of a Yellow Sun.” On Friday, she released an elegy she had written for Achebe in the Igbo language. “Something has happened. Something big has happened. Chinua Achebe is gone. A great writer, a man of great wisdom, a man of good heart,” she wrote.

“Who are we going to boast about? Who are we going to take out to the world? Who is going to guide us? A storm has passed! Tears fill my eyes. “Chinua Achebe, go in peace. It is well with you. Go in peace.” Nigerian novelist Lola Shoneyin, whose works include “The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives,” says Achebe’s fiction gives her something new each time she reads his work. “In the last five decades, just about every post-colonial African author, one way or another, has been engaged in a creative call-and-response with Chinua Achebe,” she said.

Igoni Barrett, the author of a collection of stories called “From Caves of Rotten Teeth,” said Achebe had achieved a “saintly status among Nigerian writers” through his pioneering

involvement in the African Writers Series. “Chinua Achebe was an inspiration to me not only for his singular talent and his dedication to truth in art and life, but also because he had the fortitude to overcome the countless disappointments of the Nigerian state,” he said.

One of Senegal’s best-known novelists, 66-year-old Boubacar Boris Diop, was in high school when he read “Things Fall Apart.” He says that in it, he found “the real Africa.” “I systematically advise young authors to read Chinua Achebe. I’ve often bought copies of ‘Things Fall Apart’ and offered them to young writers. It’s well written - in the sense that it’s not written at all. In it, you won’t find any great lyrical phrases. That’s the great force of this book. It’s written in simple language,” said Diop. “He wrote about a continent that is far from perfect, but which at the same time has things within it that fill you with wonder.” — AP

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Bollywood film actor Saif Ali Khan (center) is pictured on his way to an appearance at the court in Jodhpur yesterday. — AFP

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n Indian court will try five Bollywood actors, including action hero Salman Khan, for allegedly killing two rare deer in a western India wildlife preserve 14 years ago. Attorney KL Vyas says that while Salman Khan was charged with shooting the bucks, Saif Ali Khan, Sonali Bendre and others allegedly abetted the crime by encouraging him while hunting in Rajasthan state. The Indian court system is notoriously slow, and it often takes years and even decades for a case to go to trial. If convicted, the actors could face three to six years in prison. They deny the charges. Four of the accused appeared before a magistrate yesterday. On Thursday, Sanjay Dutt had a conviction for illegal possession of weapons upheld, and the Bollywood leading man now faces prison time. — AP

ollywood star Russell Crowe and Australian footballers joined US talk show host Ellen DeGeneres in Sydney for the first filming of her popular programme Down Under yesterday. “I love you guys,” DeGeneres told the 3,000 fans who packed an open-air Royal Botanic Garden set which looked out across the harbour to the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Sydney Opera House. “I love this country. I’m moving here,” she joked.

DeGeneres arrived in Sydney with her Australian actor wife Portia de Rossi on Friday for the highly-anticipated six-day visit officials are hoping will boost tourism.

Crowe, recruited to instruct DeGeneres in how to use a stockman’s whip, produced a map of Australia and did his bit to deliver the tourism message. “Spending a small amount of time in Australia is not as good as spending a lot of time in Australia,” the Oscar-winning actor said. Also on stage with the popular host were Australian Rules footballers from the Sydney Swans and rugby league star Greg Inglis, who plays for Crowe’s South Sydney Rabbitohs.

Hundreds of cheering fans greeted the American comedian when she touched down in Sydney airport, and thousands more queued up for hours for tickets to the taping which were available on a first-in, first-served basis.

“It’s all worth it. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity and we’re just so excited that she’s here,” one woman said after waiting five hours for her tickets. Authorities hope the visit by the talk show queen to Sydney and Melbourne will showcase the cities to a broad American audience, with Destination New South Wales chief Sandra Chipchase saying the trip was a “golden” opportunity.

DeGeneres spent part of Friday getting up close to koalas and giraffes at Taronga Zoo and her visit has even inspired a response from Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who is facing turbulent times in her Labor Party.

“Welcome to Australia TheEllenShow. Hope you get to see as much as possible of our beautiful country. JG,” Gillard tweeted. — AFP

US talk show host Ellen DeGeneres (right) watches as actor Russell Crowe kicks a football into the crowd during a recording for Ellen’s show in Sydney, Australia yesterday. — AP

This handout photo shows US talkshow host Ellen DeGeneres (right) along with her wife Portia de Rossi on stage during the taping of her show in Sydney. — AFP

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

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(Left) Late night talk show hosts Jay Leno and Jimmy Fallon pose in the press room at the Golden Globes awards ceremony in Beverly Hills in this file photo. (Right) Jimmy Kimmel poses on arrival for the 2013 MusiCares Person of the Year Tribute in this file photo in Los Angeles. — AFP

Leno makes meal of NBC bosses in monologue J

ay Leno is keeping up a comedy assault on his NBC bosses even after being treated to a makenice dinner. During his monologue Friday, the “Tonight Show” host asked his Burbank studio audience if they’d heard about his “alleged feud” with NBC. Leno started taking on-air potshots at the network this month amid reports that the network plans to replace him at “Tonight” with Jimmy Fallon.

According to a NBC transcript from Friday’s taping, Leno said that he had dinner Thursday with a “bunch of NBC executives” who offered to make things up to him: He and his wife are going on an all-expenses paid Carnival Cruise, he joked.

In February, passengers endured five nightmarish days on a crippled Carnival Cruise ship in the Gulf of Mexico. In another wisecrack, Leno cited news reports of a Canadian man who had a knife pulled from his back after three years. Sniped Leno:

“He must have worked at NBC, too.” NBC confirmed this week it’s creating a new studio for Fallon in New York, where he hosts “Late Night.” But the network did not comment on a report that the digs at its Rockefeller Plaza headquarters may become home to a transplanted, Fallon-hosted “Tonight.”

This isn’t the first time the “Tonight” stage has been used for a workplace dispute. In 2010, when Conan O’Brien briefly took over as “Tonight” host and Leno was moved to prime-time at NBC, the two traded on-air barbs. Although late-night hosts are known for needling their network bosses, the timing of Leno’s latest jabs seemed to make NBC’s executives particularly uncomfortable and they asked him to stop. They don’t want a repeat of the publicly messy turnover of just three years ago.

The 62-year-old Leno’s current contract expires next year. For NBC, the 38-year-old Fallon repre-

sents a bid to launch a next-generation host for “Tonight” - although Leno has kept the show No. 1 in the ratings despite a challenge from Jimmy Kimmel’s ABC show, which was moved back an hour to compete with it. “You know the whole legend of St Patrick, right? St. Patrick drove all the snakes out of Ireland and then they came to the United States and became NBC executives,” Leno joked on Monday’s show. On Tuesday, he played off a news report about a Serbian woman with a rare brain condition that causes her to see the world upside down: “Isn’t that crazy? It’s unbelievable. She sees everything upside down. In fact, she thinks NBC is at the top of the ratings.” — AP

Models present creations by Lino Villaventura during the 2013 Summer collections of the Sao Paulo Fashion Week in Sao Paulo,Brazil. — AFP

obody’s going to win an Emmy for a parody of the TV show “Star Trek” filmed by Internal Revenue Service employees at an agency studio in Maryland. Instead, the IRS got a rebuke from Congress for wasting taxpayer dollars.

The agency says the video, along with a training video that parodied the TV show “Gilligan’s Island,” cost about $60,000. The “Star Trek” video accounted for most of the money, the agency said. The IRS said Friday it was a mistake for employees to make the six-minute video. It was shown at the opening of a 2010 training and leadership conference but does not appear to have any training value.

The video features an elaborate set depicting the control room, or bridge, of the spaceship featured in the hit TV show.

IRS workers portray the characters, including one who plays Mr Spock, complete with fake hair and pointed ears. The production value is high even though the acting is what one might expect from a bunch of tax collectors. In the video, the spaceship is approaching the planet “Notax,” where alien identity theft appears to be a problem.

“The IRS recognizes and takes seriously our obligation to be good stewards of government resources and taxpayer dollars,” the agency said in a statement. “There is no mistaking that this video did not reflect the best stewardship of resources.” The agency said it has tightened controls over the use of its production equipment to “ensure that all IRS videos are handled in a judicious manner that makes wise use of taxpayer funds while ensuring a tone and theme appropriate for the nation’s tax system.”

The agency also said, “A video of this type would not be made today.” The video was released late in the day Friday after

investigators from the House Ways and Means Committee requested it. “There is nothing more infuriating to a taxpayer than to find out the government is using their hard-earned dollars in a way that is frivolous,” said Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La, chairman of the Ways and Means oversight subcommittee. “The IRS admitted as much when it disclosed that it no longer produces such videos.”

The film was made at an IRS studio in New Carrollton, Md., a suburb of Washington. The agency said it uses the studio to make training films and informational videos for taxpayers. “The use of video training and video outreach through the in-house studio has become increasingly important to the IRS to reach both taxpayers and employees,” the agency said. “In the current budget environment, using video for training purposes helps us save millions of dollars and is an important part of successful IRS cost-efficiency efforts.”

IRS YouTube videos have been viewed more than 5 million times, the agency said.

A video on the IRS website called “When Will I Get My Refund?” has been seen 950,000 times this filing season. The disclosure of the “Star Trek” video comes as agencies throughout the federal government face automatic spending cuts, including employee furloughs at many of them.

Acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller has told employees they could be furloughed five to seven days this summer. The furloughs, however, will be delayed until after tax filing season so refunds should not be affected. —AP

Thousands pack Ellen DeGeneres’ Sydney filming

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SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

Bollywood actress Jacqueline Fernandez dances with traditional Zulu dancers during the launch of the South Africa India Film and Television Awards (SAIFTA) in Durban on March 22, 2013.

A model showcases a creation by designer Aarti Vijay Gupta.

Bollywood film actress Priyanka Chopra showcases a creation by designer Manish Malhotra during a fashion show on the first day of Lakme Fashion Week (LFW) Summer/Resort 2013 in Mumbai on March 22, 2013. — AFP photos

Indian Bollywood film actress Sophie Choudry poses.

Bollywood film actress Hema Malini poses.

Bollywood film actress Esha Gupta poses.

Bollywood film actresses Kajol Devgan (left) and Karishma Kapoor showcase cre- Bollywood film actress Mugdha Godse ations by designer Manish Malhotra (center) during a fashion show on the first day is seen. of Lakme Fashion Week (LFW) Summer/Resort 2013 in Mumbai.

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Bollywood actor Shahid Kapoor showcases a creation by designer Kunal Rawal.

ashion designer Oscar de la Renta has been a favorite of many US first ladies, including Betty Ford, Nancy Reagan, Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton. But one name is still missing from his list: Michelle Obama. De la Renta says he is not worried about not having Obama on his list of celebrity clients because for him what matters is dressing everyday women.

De la Renta says that “an anonymous woman on the street is the woman who influences fashion today, not a movie star or a first lady.” Obama has appeared on many best-dressed lists and

De la Renta has been among the few who have criticized her choices, specifically her decision to wear a sweater when she met Queen Elizabeth II in 2009. The designer said that he had said nice things and made the comment to avoid “sounding like a package of sugar.” “It is a relation that began poorly and I think it will end the same way,” the designer said Friday during a Mexico City fashion gala. — AP