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42 16Mexican business delegation to embark for Tehran on Sept. 19

Iranian official in Russia for Syria talks

Tehran museum celebrates Hushang Moradi Kermani’s 72nd birthday

W W W . T E H R A N T I M E S . C O M I N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L YL YIranian Paralympic archers win silver medals in Rio 15

16 Pages Price 10,000 Rials 38th year No.12648 Tuesday SEPTEMBER 13, 2016 Shahrivar 23, 1395 Dhul Hijjah 11, 1437

France’s ex-ambassador: Major disaster if JCPOA

is violated I am optimistic about the return of Airbus and

Boeing to Iran, François Nicoullaud says

TEHRAN — To assess the opportunities created by the nuclear deal - officially called the JCPOA - and also the threats to this international treaty, the Tehran Times has talked to François Nicoullaud, the former French ambas-sador to Tehran. Nicoullaud, who served in Iran from 2001 to 2005, says it would be “a major disaster for everybody” if the JCPOA is not implemented.

Following is the text of interview: Despite the JCPOA some major European banks

are still reluctant to enter banking transactions with Iran, fearing a punishment by the U.S. Treasury. What are the main obstacles?

A: The main obstacle is that the dollar cannot be used as a currency in transactions between Iran and Europe without triggering sanctions from the USA. But most international transactions use the dollar, even if for purely technical reasons. For instance, if you want to transform an important sum of rials into euros, it goes very often in the international banking system through a transformation of your rials into dollars before these

dollars are in turn transformed into euros. That is enough to activate the U.S. sanctions. Another obstacle is the gap existing between the Iranian banking system and the inter-

national system, as the Iranian system has been isolated for

many years from the outer world.

TEHRAN — Three

Iranian films were honored in various sections of the Moondance International Film Festival, which was held in Boulder, Colorado in the U.S. on September 4 and 5.

Moin Karimeddini’s ac-

claimed film “Atlan” won one of the five awards for best feature documentary while one the five awards for best film was presented to “The Sea and the Flying Fish” di-rected by Mehrdad Ghaf-farzadeh.

Other winners in both

sections were from the U.S., Canada, Russia, Ger-many and several othercountries.

Iranian short film “The Saltman” by Seyyed Sajjad Musavi was also among the seven winners of the awards for best short film.

Iranian films win awards at Moondance festival

Israeli MP: Tel Aviv aiding Takfiris in SyriaAn Israeli lawmaker has criticized the Tel Aviv regime for supporting Takfiri terrorists who are fighting in Syria to topple the legitimate government of President Bashar al-Assad.

In a Facebook post on Sunday, Akram Hasson said the Fateh al-Sham (For-merly known as al-Nusra Front/Jabhat al-Nusra) terrorist group, is operating in Syria with “unprecedented logistical and medical” support from Israel.

He said Israel's recent escalation of attacks on the Syrian army positions in the Golan Heights are aimed at paving the way for the terrorist group to gain more grounds.

Golan belongs to Syria, and the in-ternational community has never rec-ognized Israel’s occupation of around 1,200 square km (460 square miles) of the territory during the 1967 Six-Day War and its annexation later.

Scores of illegal settlements have been built in the area over the years while the Israeli regime has used the area to launch attacks against the Syr-ian government and its allies.

Israel has recently intensified its air-strikes on the Golan Heights, targeting the Syrian army and the Lebanese re-sistance movement Hezbollah, which is assisting Damascus in the fight against Takfiri terrorists.

The Israeli lawmaker further said that the Fateh al-Sham terrorist group is bombing the Syrian Druze village of Khadr, with the support of Israeli Minister of Military Affairs Avigdor Lieberman.

“This new strategy led by Lieberman since he took office has strengthened the Nusra Front and it’s raising its head to attack our brothers,” Hasson wrote.

Citing eyewitnesses, Hasson said the Takfiri terrorist group is using ad-vanced technological equipment, add-ing Israel's strategic support has been broadened over the past few months.

Syria has been gripped by for-eign-backed militancy since March 2011. United Nations Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura estimates that over 400,000 people have been killed in the conflict.

Damascus has blamed regional players, including Saudi Arabia and Israel, for supporting Takfiri militants inside the country. (Source: Press TV)

Canadians sign petition calling for diplomatic ties with Tehran

TEHRAN — Thousands of Canadian citi-zens and residents have signed a petition,

carried on the official website of the Parliament of Canada, calling for the re-establishment of diplomatic ties with Tehran.

More than four thousands have signed the petition up to now. “We, the undersigned, citizens and residents of Canada,

call upon the Government of Canada to re-establish diplo-matic relations with Iran, including re-opening embassies in both countries, as a matter of utmost importance,” read part of the petition.

No gap between

artists and the government:

culture minister

TEHRAN — Minister of Culture

and Islamic Guidance Ali Jannati has said that there is no gap between Iranian artists and the government anymore.

He made the remarks among a large number of cineastes attending a ceremony organized in the courtyard of the Film Museum of Iran on Sunday night to celebrate the National Cine-ma Day.

“You remember the dividing poli-cies between the artists and govern-ment,” Jannati said in a short speech at the ceremony.

“Much time was spent to change the unfriendly atmosphere and today, there is no gap between artists and the government anymore, and the gov-ernment holds a stake in your happy and sad events,” he added.

He praised the new boom in Irani-an box office receipts and said, “If the cineastes had not made great efforts over the past few years, our younger generation would have to be consum-ers of Hollywood productions.”

Cinema Organization of Iran Direc-tor Hojjatollah Ayyubi also attended the celebration. 1 6

TEHRAN — Millions of Iranians marked

Eid al-Adha on Monday while remem-bering the memory of 464 Iranian pil-

grims who lost their lives during a hajj stampede in Mina in September 2015, which Tehran blamed on the organizers’ incompetence.

Iranian pilgrims could not participate in this year’s hajj ritual due to Saudis’ reluctance to give “guarantees” to Iran over the security of its pilgrims.

Iran marks Eid al-Adha, Mina crush

See page 2

I.R Iran Customs Administration (IRICA)Finance and Economic Affairs Ministry

International Public Tender Notice (Two Stage)“Purchase of One Set of Relocatable X-Ray

Inspection System”First Announcement See Page 3

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By Zahra Khodaie EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

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ECONOMYd e s k

TEHRAN — The 18th international

congress on the latest cardiovascu-lar diseases and related technology opens today at Milad Tower in Tehran on Tuesday.

The 4-day conference will bring to-

gether over 4,000 participants includ-ing cardiologists, cardiac surgeons and nurses, and other heart related professions at both national and in-ternational levels. Around 20 speakers are expected to come from European and North American countries.

At the function, medical pro-fessionals will get a chance to exchange views and discuss the newest in this field as well as ob-serve the latest technology in car-diac care equipment, approved by world organizations.

Tehran to host 18th intl. cardiovascular congress M E D I C I N Ed e s k

TEHRAN — Ali Ak-

bar Velayati, a senior foreign policy advisor to the Leader, has said the Iranian delega-tion visiting the annual UN General Assembly meet-ing in New York will expose Washington’s disloyalties to the nuclear deal, officially known as the JCPOA, IRNA reported.

“The United States has failed to (fully) observe its commitments regarding the Joint Comprehensive Plan of

Action and the Islamic Re-public’s delegation, while in New York to participate in the upcoming UN General Assembly’s annual session, will follow up on this issue,” the senior official told re-porters on Sunday.

D i s t i n g u i s h i n g among the 5+1 mem-ber countries, Velayati said, “Without doubt, Russia and China act-ed more re-

sponsibly and cooperated much more than some other members of the 5+1 group.”

“We also view France in some way like these two,” he added.

Velayati further said that the United States tends to break its promises more often than others.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani will leave Tehran to New York on September 16 to

participate in the annul UN General Assembly session.

Apart from an address to the General Assembly, Rou-hani is scheduled to hold several meetings with senior foreign officials in New York.

Thereafter, he will leave the United States for Vene-zuela to hold talks with his Venezuelan counterpart Nicolas Maduro.

The Iranian president will also fly to Cuba, however, the details of his schedule have not been yet announced.

Iran to expose Washington’s disloyalty to JCPOA in UN: official

official told re-Sunday.

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Iran dismisses reports Leader ordered hajj ritual in Karbala

TEHRAN — Iran’s interest section in Cairo has blasted Arab media outlets for report-

ing that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei had issued an edict calling for performing this year’s hajj ritual in Karbala, Iraq.

“Such edict has been issued neither in the current year nor in previous years and the news is incorrect, fabricated and libel,” read part of the announcement of Iran’s interest section.

Iranians could not attend this year’s hajj ritual as Riyadh could not soothe Tehran’s concerns over security issues after 464 Iranian pilgrims lost their lives in a crush in Mina during the last year’s hajj pilgrimage.

“The Saudis’ incompetence and negligence and the un-safety imposed by them on hajj pilgrims as well as their lack of cooperation are the main and real causes of absence of Irani-

an Muslims in the hajj rituals this year,” the announcement underscored.

While Tehran held several rounds of negotiations with Saudi officials to pave the way for Iranians to perform this year’s hajj, the talks broke down at the end of the day.

“Making pilgrimage to (the shrine of ) Imam Hussein on the Arafa day has been recommended in numerous hadiths and narratives…” read another part of the announcement.

According to one account, on the Arafat day, which falls on the 9th day of Dhul Hijj, Imam Hussein was forced to leave his hajj unfinished as the tyrannical forces of his time were trying to make him obey them.

P O L I T I C Sd e s k

THAI to increase flights to Tehran from Oct.

Rouhani to attend NAM summit in Venezuela on Friday

Thai Air-w a y s

International (THAI) an-nounced that it will increase the number of its flights on the Bangkok-Tehran route to four a week from Octo-ber 1, Bangkok Post report-ed on Monday.

Many international air-lines have launched or re-sumed direct flights to Iran after the country’s nuclear deal with the world’s ma-jor powers which lifted the

sanctions against the Islam-ic Republic.

British Airways has re-sumed direct flights to Iran af-ter a hiatus of four years and Air France resumed Paris-Teh-ran flights in April for the first time in eight years.

Austrian Airlines has been offering its passen-gers an additional dai-ly flight to Tehran since March 2016, and flies to the Iranian capital up to twice each day.

TEHRAN — Pres-

ident Hassan Rouhani will visit Venezuela on Friday to attend the NAM summit.

Rouhani will submit the rotating presidency of NAM to Venezuela for the next three years.

The Iranian president will be the first speaker in the sum mit which will be held in Margarita Island.

Also, he will hold talks with heads of states of

some participating coun-tries on the sidelines of the meeting.

Following the NAM summit, Rouhani will head to Havana, where he will hold talks with Fi-del Castro and President Raul Castro.

The signing of a series of agreements with Cuba are on the agenda, said Parviz Esmaeil, the di-rector of the presidential media office.

WO

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12Some 2,000 nomad women pass literacy courses

TEHRAN — Ali Akbar Velayati, the senior for-

eign policy advisor to the Leader, said on Sunday that Iran and India play an impor-tant role in international developments and establishment of peace and stability in the region.

Velayati made the remarks during a meeting with Indian Minister of State for External Affairs Mubashir Javed Akbar in Tehran.

“Iran and India have many valuable capacities to expand relations in various areas that can be effective in establish-ing regional and international peace and stability and the issue highlights the im-portance of serious action and activity,” Velayati added.

The veteran Iranian politician added that the two countries can cooperate in fighting extremism and terrorist groups in the region.

Iran and India can also expand co-

operation in areas of economy, culture and transportation, said Velayati, a for-mer foreign minister who is the current chairman of the Center for Strategic Re-search at the Expediency Council.

The former chief diplomat also high-lighted the importance of expanding ties between Iran, India and Afghanistan.

For his part, the Indian official said Iran and India have had friendly ties for a long time and New Delhi is keen to strengthen ties with the Islamic Republic.

He also said that terrorism and ex-tremism are serious threats against the world and called for serious campaign against terrorism.

Javad Akbar and his accompanying delegation held talks on Saturday with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Ja-vad Zarif.

The Indian minister of state for ex-ternal affairs also attended the shrine of Imam Khomeini on Saturday to pay trib-

ute to the founder of the Islamic Republic. The Indian official had visited Iran to

assess the prospect of Tehran-New Delhi cooperation in the region.

SEPTEMBER 13, 2016SEPTEMBER 13, 20162 I N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L Y

h t t p : / / w w w . t e h r a n t i m e s . c o m / i n t e r n a t i o n a lN A T I O N

MEDIA HIGHLIGHTS

TEHRAN — The Iranian deputy for-eign minister for Arab affairs left Teh-

ran for Moscow on Monday for talks with Russian officials on regional developments, especially the Syrian conflict.

Hossein Jaberi Ansari’s visit to Moscow came after Russia and the United States on Saturday agreed on a truce in Syria. The ceasefire was expected to go into force on Monday morning.

Jaberi Ansari’s visit took place upon the invitation of Russian Deputy Foreign Minister for Middle East Mikhail Bogdanov.

In August, Bogdanov travelled to Iran for talks on the Syrian crisis.

Iran and Russia hold regular consultations on the Syr-ian conflict.

In May, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, the then deputy foreign minister for Arab affairs, travelled to Russia to discuss the Syrian war with Bogdanov.

Iran and Russia have been backing the Syrian gov-ernment against militants who are backed by certain Arab regimes, like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, Turkey and

some Western countries. However, with a thaw in relation between Turkey and

Russia it is expected that rivalry between the main power players in Syria to undergo some changes.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif also visited Turkey in August with the Syria crisis on the top of the agenda. At the time Zarif described Iran, Russia and Turkey as “important players in the Middle East region” and said it is necessary to hold dialogue and coopera-tion to resolve regional problems.

1 Performing hajj is an obligation for every able-bod-

ied Muslim who can afford it at least once. On Friday, thousands of Iranians took to the streets

in the capital city Tehran and other cities, demanding the Saudi government to shoulder responsibility for the crush.

The two, who disagree on a list of other regional chal-lenges including the Syrian conflict, have grown increas-ingly unfriendly toward each other, particularly over the past few days as Iranians marked the first anniversary of the Mina stampede.

The Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani, in an an-nouncement on Monday, censured Riyadh for the inci-dent.

“We mark the first anniversary of the painful and heart-wrenching Mina tragedy as well as celebrate Eid al-Adha while the people of the Islamic Iran, Muslims across the world, and all vigilant consciences continue to mourn the loss of the innocent victims of the (Mina) incident…”

Larijani further called for establishment of a fact-find-ing committee to look into the tragedy.

“It is befitting that the Islam world and all high-minded international communities listen to their vigilant conscience and put on agenda formation of a fact-finding committee for the incident,” the top law-maker noted.

However, Riyadh has so far declined to cooperate with Iran on the issue, though Tehran has proposed initiatives to mend the fences over the impasse, as stressed by Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Ja-vad Zarif.

“Unfortunately, after the improper storming of Saudi Arabia’s embassy in Tehran, the Saudi regime has used it as a pretext to close all bilateral channels to follow up on terrible consequences of the incident and has not replied to all initiatives and attempts of the Islamic Republic of Iran including bilateral attempts, the formation of an international, Islamic fact-finding

committee with the cooperation of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and even brotherly and volun-tary attempts of some Islamic countries of the region with the goal of escaping the responsibility and apol-ogizing the inflicted people and compensating the damage,” Zarif explained.

Also, head of Iran’s Hajj and Pilgrimage Organization Saeed Owhadi said on Saturday that Iran will do its ut-most to follow up on the rights of the Mina crush victims.

Owhadi said that the Islamic Republic will pursue the stampede case through legal and political chan-nels.

The fiercest remarks, however, were made by Su-preme Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei on last Wednesday who lambasted the Saudis for mismanage-ment of the hajj ritual.

“The incompetence of the Saudis and the insecurity imposed by them against the hajj pilgrims to the House of God indeed demonstrated that this government is not qualified to manage the Two Holy Mosques and this re-ality must be spread in the Muslim world and be under-stood,” the Leader asserted.

Although Saudi Arabia has got off scot-free so far, if Tehran takes the case to international arbitration, then Riyadh has to pay off both politically and financially.

Yet, it remains to be seen how Riyadh will react to save its international face.

Iranian official in Russia for Syria talks

Iran marks Eid al-Adha, Mina crush

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TEHRAN — Iranian President Hassan Rouhani sent separate

messages to Islamic heads of state on Sunday con-gratulating them on Eid al-Adha.

Rouhani expressed hope that the true image of Islam would be presented to the world and the roots of division among the Muslims would be eradicated.

Eid al-Adha, “Festival of the Sacrifice”, is also called the “Sacrifice Feast” or “Bakr-Eid” commem-orates Prophet Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son, as an act of submission to God’s command, before God then intervened sending his angel Ji-bra’il (Gabriel) and informs him that his sacrifice has already been accepted.

Rouhani congratulates Muslims on Eid al-Adha

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TEHRAN — An Iranian cleric has called for bringing Saudi rulers to

justice for the last year’s hajj crush in Mina as hun-dreds, maybe thousands, of pilgrims from different countries were killed, IRNA reported on Monday.

“There is no doubt that Saudi rulers are the main perpetrators of the Mina disaster and should stand trial and be punished in an Islamic court,” said Seyyed Ahmad Khatami during the Eid al-Adha prayer in Tehran.

In the stampede on September 24 last year 464 Iranian nationals were killed.

Cleric says Saudi rulers must stand trial for Mina stampede

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22 convicts repatriated from Azerbaijan

TEHRAN — An Iranian consular official in Azerbaijan confirmed

on Monday the repatriation of 22 Iranian convicts detained in the Republic of Azerbaijan, saying it makes the 20th time Tehran and Baku are repatriat-ing convicts, Tasnim reported.

Most of the inmates had been convicted of drug smuggling in Azerbaijan, according to Seyyed Nas-er Mirjamali.

The repatriation took place on Monday at the Astara border crossing, northwestern Iran, as the Iranians were celebrating Eid al-Adha.

The official gave no details if Iran repatriated Azerbaijani convicts, as well.

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Rouhani to visit Armenia; no date set yet

TEHRAN — The Iranian ambas-sador to Yerevan has announced

that President Hassan Rouhani will visit Armenia to exchange views with the country’s officials on a wide range of issues, giving no date, ISNA reported on Monday.

“We are following up on the issue but no date can be given yet considering the (Iranian) presi-dent’s busy schedule. But the visit will be made an-yway,” said Ambassador Mohammad Raisee, speak-ing to a press conference in Yerevan.

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Salehi in Brussels for nuclear cooperation

TEHRAN — Ali Akbar Salehi, di-rector of the Atomic Energy Or-

ganization of Iran, left Tehran for Brussels on Mon-day, heading a delegation.

The trip is taken at the invitation of European Commissioner for Energy Miguel Arias Canete, IRNA reported.

Salehi plans to meet a number of Belgian offi-cials including the country’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Didier Reynders and also a number of EU officials to discuss cooperation espe-cially in the nuclear field.

Cooperation documents are scheduled to be signed.

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Iran’s Assyrians congratulate Leader on Eid al-Adha

TEHRAN — The representative of the Assyrians in Majlis, Youna-

than Betkolia, sent a message on Sunday to Lead-er of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei congratulating him on Eid al-Adha, also called “Festival of the Sacrifice”.

The message by Assyrians shows peaceful coex-istence of people with different faiths and respect for divine religions in Iran.

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TEHRAN — The Iranian nuclear chief

Ali Akbar Salehi has said a violation of the nuclear deal by Washington will question the “political credibility” of the country.

“The JCPOA is a political agree-ment and questioning the deal by the Americans will come as a blow to political credibility of the U.S.,” said Salehi in an interview with Al-Manar TV channel.

Salehi’s comments come two days after Iran started the construc-tion of two nuclear power plants with the cooperation of the Rus-sian Rosatom, itself an outcome of the nuclear deal Iran and six world powers, including the U.S., clinched in July 2015.

The U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has said he

will “rip it (the nuclear deal) off” or “po-lice” it.

This is while Hillary Clinton, Trump’s Democrat rival, has lent support to the deal, saying she will keep the U.S. side of the bargain.

In reply to the comments, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei had said if the U.S. turns out to tear up the deal, Tehran will “torch it.”

Even if Washington appears lax on its commitment to the deal, it won’t take too long for Iran to reverse its nu-clear program, Salehi underscored last month.

“Necessary measures have been worked out for a swift reversing (of the nuclear program) if the JCPOA is violat-ed by the other side.”

The nuclear deal between Iran and world powers went into effect on Jan-uary 16.

Salehi: Undermining JCPOA will jeopardize U.S. ‘political credibility’

TEHRAN – A top Iranian military com-

mander has dismissed as untrue the claims by the U.S. that an American warship was harassed by Iranian boats in the Persian Gulf earlier this month, saying Iran acted according to interna-tional law.

“Iranian vessels are fully aware of in-ternational laws and regulations, so the claims are not only untrue, but stem from their fear of the power of Iranian soldiers,” Masoud Jazayeri, deputy chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces, said on Sunday.

The Pentagon last week said seven fast-attack boats of the Islamic Revolu-tion Guard Corps (IRGC) approached the USS Firebolt on September 4 with their machine guns uncovered, though not trained on the Americans.

It was the fifth incident that the Pen-

tagon claimed has happened in the past month, with U.S. military increas-ingly criticizing the Iranian military for its actions in the Persian Gulf.

However, Brigadier General Jazayeri said the remarks were exaggerated, IRNA reported.

Elsewhere in his remarks, Jazayeri underscored Iran’s right to safeguard its sea borders and economic interests, saying that the Iranian naval units will never be deterred by the media propa-ganda posed against the country.

“Whenever the Iranian vessels pass by their ships at a distance of several kilometers, Americans claim that Ira-nian vessels have approached them within a range of one kilometer,” the senior commander added.

Jazayeri also said that the Islamic Republic of Iran will never be “influ-enced” by any power.

Iran rejects U.S. claims of warship harassment in Persian Gulf

Velayati calls Iran, India regional and international players

N. Korea ready to conduct another nuclear test: SeoulNorth Korea is ready to conduct another nuclear test at any time, South Korea’s defense ministry said on Monday, just days after Pyongyang sparked worldwide condemnation with its fifth and most powerful test.

The North has said the test has realized its goal of being able to fit a miniaturized warhead on a rocket, prompting urgent talks at the United Nations Security Council and calls for new sanctions.

“An additional test could be conducted in a tunnel that branches off from the second tunnel or in the third tunnel, where preparations have been completed,” said ministry spokesman Moon Sang-Gyun.

He said the South’s military is on full combat-readiness to respond to “further nuclear tests, ballistic missile launches or land provocation”.

All five nuclear tests have been conducted at the Pung-gye-ri site in the country’s northeast. The initial one in Oc-tober 2006 was in the first tunnel and the last four in the second tunnel, according to Seoul’s defense ministry.

In a statement hailing the “success” of its test on Friday, the North vowed to take further measures to increase its nu-clear strike force “in quality and in quantity”.

The yield from Friday’s test was estimated at 10 kilotons, almost twice as much as the one Pyongyang conducted only eight months earlier, and analyst say it signals its nuclear ca-pability has grown significantly.

However, opinion is split over whether Pyongyang really has made nuclear warheads small enough to arm its missile units, and even if so what the range of such a nuclear-tipped missile would be.

The ruling party newspaper Rodong Sinmun nevertheless declared on Monday that the nuclear program’s “miraculous successes” mean the North has not only the United States bas-es in the Asia-Pacific but also the U.S. mainland “in its clutches”.

Should Washington launch a war against it, Pyongyang would “blow up the land of America and thus finally root out the source of war on the earth”, it said.

The United Nations Security Council has agreed to start work on new punitive measures, even though five sets of United Nations sanctions since the first test have failed to halt the North’s nuclear drive.

At a meeting with ruling and opposition party leaders on Monday, South Korean President Park Geun-Hye called for political unity in the face of the mounting threat.

“I believe it is important to show the people that we are moving forward as one mind,” she said.

And Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told military of-ficials that Tokyo was confronting an “extremely harsh reali-ty” with both Pyongyang and Beijing posing serious security challenges to Japan.

He said Pyongyang’s decision to conduct two nuclear tests in a span of nine months was “absolutely unacceptable”.

Strong measuresMeantime, Sung Kim, the U.S. State Department’s special

representative for North Korea policy, said on Sunday during a visit to Japan that Washington and Tokyo would work close-ly to come up with the strongest possible measures.

He also suggested the U.S. may launch its own sanctions.The envoy will arrive in Seoul later on Monday and hold

talks with his South Korean counterpart Kim Hong-Kyun the following day.

Washington also plans to stage an overflight of South Ko-rea by two B-1B Lancer supersonic bombers as a show of strength, Yonhap news agency said.

U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) said the flight had been delayed a day because of bad weather and would arrive tomorrow, identifying the planes only as “strategic aircraft”.

“The mission is aimed at reinforcing the U.S. commitment to its key ally following North Korea’s nuclear test,” a USFK spokesman told AFP.

Washington took similar military actions following previ-ous atomic tests.

U.S. troops have been based in South Korea since the 1950-53 Korean War ended only in an armistice and not a full peace treaty. They currently number 28,500.

(Source AFP)

Syria’s Assad delivers Eid message from DarayyaSyrian President Bashar al-Assad has delivered a message by performing prayers for the Muslim Eid al-Adha (the Feast of Sacrifice) holiday in the Damascus suburb of Darayya, only recently surrendered by rebels.

State media on Monday showed the leader attending the prayers at the Saad Bin Moaz mosque in the suburb, which was previously a rebel stronghold synonymous with resist-ance to his rule.

“I am here with the entire government to send a clear message that we are determined to retake every inch of Syria from the terrorists and to restore peace and stability in the country and to rebuild everything that have been destroyed in the past,” he said in footage broadcast on state TV.

After years of siege and violence, Darayya’s remaining residents and rebel fighters evacuated in late August after a deal with the government, which has since retaken control.

Assad was joined at the prayers by several members of his ruling party, as well as ministers and members of parliament. The mufti, or Muslim cleric, presiding over the prayers, hailed Darayya as an example for Syria, which has been ravaged by war since 2011.

“Darayya is living proof for all Syrians that the only option available to you is reconciliation and abandoning fighting,” said Adnan al-Afiyuni, mufti for Damascus province.

Rebels said they had been forced to agree the deal with the government after the siege created a humanitarian crisis for Darayya’s remaining residents.

But the government has touted the deal, and similar agreements, as the best way to achieve local ceasefires and end the violence.

(Source: agencies)

SEPTEMBER 13, 2016SEPTEMBER 13, 2016 INTERNATIONALh t t p : / / w w w . t e h r a n t i m e s . c o m / i n t e r n a t i o n a l 3I N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L Y

Millions of Muslims worldwide have celebrated the Eid al-Adha (the Feast of Sacrifice), which marks the culmi-nation of the annual Hajj pilgrimage.

Muslims flocked to mosques and open grounds to take part in celebrations marking the auspicious occa-sion, which is one of the most significant festivals on the Muslim calendar, on Monday.

In Iran, a mass prayer was held in the capital city of Tehran. Ayatollah Seyyed Ahmad Khatami led the Eid al-Adha prayers, with people from various walks of life and high-profile officials in attendance.

Muslims traditionally celebrate Eid al-Adha with the sacrifice of sheep, cattle, camels and other livestock and distribute the meat among the poor and needy people.

The act commemorates Prophet Ibrahim or Abra-

ham (PBUH)’s submission to divine order to sacrifice his son, Ismail (PBUH). Just before sacrificing his son, God provided Prophet Abraham with a ram to sacrifice in-stead after he successfully passed the divine test.

The major rituals of the Hajj are performed during a five-day period from the 8th through the 12th of Dhu al-Hijjah on the Muslim lunar calendar.

The Hajj pilgrimage is a religious ritual, which must be performed at least once by every able-bodied Mus-lim who can afford it.

It is one of the largest acts of mass pilgrimage in the world.

The holy pilgrimage is also a demonstration of Mus-lims’ unity and their submission to Allah.

(Source: Press TV)

America’s response to the Septem-ber 2001 terrorist attacks, par ticu-larly the invasion of Iraq, fostered rather than curbed global terrorism, French President Francois Hollande has said, adding that France has suffered from the United States for-eign policy choices.

In a Facebook post commemorating

the victims of the 9/11 attacks, Hollande criticized the way the administration of then President George W. Bush respond-ed to the tragedy.

“The response that the American administration gave to these attacks... far from eradicating the threat, ex-panded it over a wider area. Namely to Iraq,” the French leader wrote, as quot-

ed by AFP.“And even though France, through

[ex-President] Jacques Chirac, rightly refused to join the intervention [in Iraq] which it condemned, it has nonetheless been a victim of the consequences of the chaos it caused.”

The French president added that ex-tremist Islamists are targeting democracy,

freedom, tolerance and culture, but that those values would ultimately triumph.

On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorist group organized the hijack-ing of four planes, resulting in the biggest attack on America in mod-ern history. Washington’s immediate response was to attack Taliban-con-trolled Afghanistan, which harbored the terrorist organization’s Leader, Osama bin Laden.

Two years later the U.S. invaded Iraq, with the allegations that Saddam Hus-sein’s government had links to al-Qaeda being among the key arguments for the move. No such links were found after the country was occupied.

The Islamic State in Iraq and the Le-vant (ISIL/Daesh) terrorist group – the most notorious modern terrorist organ-ization and the perpetrator of a number of high-profile terrorist attacks on West-ern countries – rose to power in Iraq, which descended into sectarian violence after the U.S. installed a new govern-ment.

France has seen the heaviest toll in civilian lives among Western countries targeted by the ISIL.

In his post, Hollande said each such attack was like a re-enact-ment of 9/11, with its consequences of “buried lives, broken destinies and grieving families.”

One of the largest losses of life took place in November 2015 in and outside the French capital Paris, when terrorist attacks claimed the lives of 137 people and injured 368 others. Claimed by the ISIL, the attacks targeted the Stade de France stadium in Saint-Denis and vari-ous locations across the capital, includ-ing the Bataclan Theater where hostages were taken. The attack was the worst in France since World War II and the deadli-est in the European Union since the 2004 Madrid train bombings, when 192 people were killed. (Source: RT)

The landmark new Syrian ceasefire plan, brokered in Geneva by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his United States counterpart, John Kerry, started on Monday evening. It will initiate an ini-tial 48-hour truce, which must then hold for the entire week.

The truce is to see the nationwide halt of Syrian government military ac-tion against rebels as well as cooperation on strikes against terrorist targets. The agreement also envisions a halt to offen-sives by the rebel forces in Syria and their separation from terrorist groups.

Kerry previously said that the ceasefire comes into effect “at sundown” on Sep-tember 12, Damascus time.

According to the deal extremist or-ganizations such as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/Daesh) terrorist group or Fateh al-Sham (Formerly known as al-Nusra Front/Jabhat al-Nusra) are excluded from the cessation of violence and will be subjected to further attacks.

In case the ceasefire holds for at least a week Moscow and Washington would also establish the Russian-U.S. Joint Im-plementation Centre (JIG) that would serve the purpose of “delineation of ter-ritories controlled by al-Nusra Front and opposition groups in the area of active hostilities.”

The 48-hours nationwide ceasefire is the first step of a proposed seven day truce and is part of a greater peace plan agreed on between Moscow and Wash-ington. Another key element of it is the supplying of aid to the civilian popula-

tion, particularly in the embattled city of Aleppo.

The announcement of the deal fol-lowed marathon talks in Geneva that started on Friday morning and lasted over 13 hours. Kerry has called “on every Syrian stakeholder to support the plan that the United States and Russia have reached” to aid the peace process in Syr-ia.

Following the talks European Union officials, along with Turkey, welcomed the outcome as a step towards reconciliation that could end years of violence.

The European Union’s top diplomat, Federica Mogherini also called on “all parties to the conflict, other than groups

designated as terrorist organizations by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC)” to stick to the agreement.

Russia has guaranteed the compli-ance of Syrian authorities with the terms of the agreement. Lavrov has announced that Syria’s leadership is ready to imple-ment the agreements in full.

However he noted that some parts of rebel forces have been refusing to cooperate in the peace process, instead disrupting Russia’s efforts to supply hu-manitarian aid to Aleppo by threatening its convoys.

Washington also called on so-called moderate rebels, parts of which are backed by the U.S. to stick to the deal.

However it added that the groups had a “right for self-defense” in case of violations of the agreement by the Syrian government.

Lavrov has also confirmed that Russia and the U.S. had agreed to coordinate airstrikes in Syria, “provided there is a sustained period of reduced violence.”

Earlier on Sunday, Ahrar al-Sham (Is-lamic Movement of the Free People of the Levant?), which was formerly a party to the previous ceasefire deal brokered by the U.S. and Russia in February, ap-parently rejected the new agreement.

In a video address published on YouTube, the group’s deputy Lead-er Ali al-Omar denounced the truce as a “half-solution” which would “only serve to reinforce the regime and surround the revolution[ary] military.”

Speaking on behalf of the hardline militant group, Omar also reportedly re-fused to cease ties with Fateh al-Sham. The separation of the so-called moder-ate opposition from al-Nusra is one of the key elements of the deal.

Russia has for long demanded the exclusion of Ahrar al-Sham from talks in Geneva and the designation of the group as terrorist, citing multiple violations of ceasefire, attacks on civilians as well as alleged use of chemical weapons. In July, the group’s militants shelled a United Na-tions humanitarian convoy near Damas-cus, while in February it claimed respon-sibility for a car bomb attack attempt at what it said was a Russian military base.

(Source: RT)

Millions of Muslims celebrate Eid al-Adha

U.S. response to 9/11 caused chaos & hurt France: Hollande

Russia & U.S.-brokered Syria ceasefire coming into force

Islamic Republic of Iran Customs Administration (IRICA) intends to purchase one set of Relocatable X-Ray Inspection System through Public, international tender according to the following conditions. Therefore, all eligible Iranian or foreign company agencies are requested to refer to mentioned address to obtain the tender documents.

1) tender Participation: International Public Tender Notice (Two Stage)“Purchase of One Set of Relocatable X-Ray Inspection System2) The amount of Participation Guarantee Bank shall be either 9,000,000,000 Iranian Rials or 225,000 Euros3) tender Participation Guarantee: As a Bank Guarantee issued by one of the Iranian banks (accredited by Central Bank of I.R.I) or be deposited to account No.4001001106370306 in the name of IRICA at the Central bank of I.R.I and submit the receipt

4) Deadline for obtaining tender documents: 10 Sep, 2016- 17 Sep, 20165) The address for obtaining tender documents and submitting bid envelops: Tenders & Contracts Bureau, Room No.104, Development & Equipment Dept. 1st floor Iran Custom Administration Bldg. Next to Nasser Alley, upper than Valiasr Sq. Tehran, Iran.

6) Deadline for submitting bids: 22 Oct, 20167) Opening bid envelopes: 23 Oct, 2016

Further information would be available at www.irica.gov.ir also “National Database Portal of Iran Tenders Information” or Tel: +98 21 82992290

IN THE NAME OF GOD

First

Announce

men

t

Development and Equipment Dept. of

Islamic Republic of Iran Customs Tenders & Contracts Bureau

1678

International Public Tender Notice (Two Stage)

“Purchase of One Set of Relocatable X-Ray Inspection System”No: 46422118

I.R Iran Customs Administration (IRICA)Finance and Economic Affairs Ministry

S N I P P E T S

N E W S

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

E C O N O M Y h t t p : / / w w w . t e h r a n t i m e s . c o m / e c o n o m ySEPTEMBER 13, SEPTEMBER 13, 20162016

Good news for the post-Brexit UK economy and five other things to look out for this week

There will probably be better news this week about the UK economy, but maybe worse news from the world’s financial markets.

Why so? Well, first the domestic side of things. This is quite a busy week for infor-mation about the UK economy. There are inflation figures on Tuesday, unemploy-ment and employment on Wednesday, and then on Thursday the decision, or al-most certainly non-decision, of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee on interest rates. It would be a surprise were inflation not to pick up a little fol-lowing the fall in the pound since June, for higher import prices eventually do feed through into domestic inflation. It would be a surprise too if employment has started to fall, for despite the shock to business confidence as a result of the Brexit vote, there should be enough mo-mentum in the economy to keep growth

running through the next few months. There might be some evidence of slowing consumer demand in Thursday, with the retail sales figures. But the biggest sur-prise of all would be for the MPC to make any changes to monetary policy. After the cut in rates last month, a controver-sial decision since the economy has per-formed better than expected, it will surely want to sit on its hands for a while yet.

So expect quite a lot of news about the economy, but expect this to confirm the now general perception that for the short-term at least, things are fine. The greater concern is a more general angst about the possible faltering the U.S. economy. The next thing to look for is any evidence of this. We ended last week with troubled markets. It is always hard to pin down quite why there should be a sud-den wave of fear because there was not really any new hard information to justify

it. However business surveys have been poor, and share markets – reflecting such concerns – had a bad week. There is no particular reason to fear another U.S. re-cession, and retails on Thursday should be reasonably strong, but the economy is running pretty close to full capacity so some slowing is likely eventually. And then there is politics.

Third, look at China. We get retail sales and industrial output figures. Are all those scares about growth just scares? You have to take any figures with a pinch of salt, and the transmission mechanism be-tween the Chinese economy and the rest of the world is unclear. We feel it mostly through changes in commodity prices, because China’s imports of those are the largest single influence on their prices.

Fourth, look for any indications about the strength of the European banking system. Unlike the U.S. banks and in a

rather different way the UK ones, most European banks have failed to rebuild their capital, or at least to do so to a suffi-cient extent. The German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble is deeply concerned about this and he is right to be.

Finally, a less immediate but ultimately most important issue: the way automated management puts pressure on workers. The point here is that there is growing concern about the way the often nomi-nally self-employed service workers who provide labor to companies such as Uber and Amazon are treated. The string of stories about exploitation have rightly led to pressure for reform, and people on the right as well as the left are starting to think about the need for some form of political intervention. Any information about the government’s intentions would be most welcome.

(Source: The Independent)

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Agus Martowardojo Governor of Indonesia’s central bank (Bank Indonesia), says there remains room for monetary easing in Southeast Asia’s largest economy in the last few months of 2016, provided that both the do-mestic and global context remain conducive. However, Martowardojo did not specify what this monetary easing exactly entails: a lower key interest rate, cutting the pri-mary minimum statutory reserves, or macro-prudential policy easing? Whatever the move may be, it will for sure be data-dependent, Martowardojo emphasized.

In the first half of the year Bank Indonesia had cut its benchmark BI rate by one percent from 7.50 percent at the year-start to 6.50 percent as inflation and the country’s current account deficit were under control, and the rupiah exchange rate was appreciating against the US dollar.

Japan’s core machinery orders rose unexpectedly in July, a preliminary sign that improving demand was leading to higher corporate spending.

Core machinery orders, a volatile data series re-garded as an indicator of mid-term capital spend-ing, increased at a seasonally adjusted 4.9 percent in July, Cabinet Office data showed Monday. A me-dian estimate of economists called for a decline of 2.8 percent. Orders had spiked 8.3 percent in June.

Volatile capital expenditure has placed more pressure on the government to stimulate growth in one of the world’s most moribund major econo-mies. The Bank of Japan (BOJ) will conduct a com-prehensive review of monetary policy at its upcom-ing Board meeting September 20-21.

President Muhammadu Buhari has saluted Nige-rians for their steadfastness in spite of the difficult economic times confronting the country.

Buhari, Sunday message to Nigerians, gave the assurance that his administration would get the economy right.

According to him, the Federal Government is “working round the clock” to address the current hardship the country is going through.

He attributed the economic recession to cumu-lative effects of worldwide economic downturn and failure in the past to plan and save for difficult times.

“It is impossible to separate the present from the past to appreciate the extent to which mistakes of the past are affecting everyday life today.

Peugeot to try for making Iran its manufacturing hub in Middle East, Africa

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Room for monetary easing in indonesia

Japan core machinery orders rise unexpectedly in July

Economy will bounce back: Nigerian President

TEHRAN — Execu-tive Vice-President of

Middle East and Africa at Peugeot S.A. Jean Christophe Quemard told IRIB news that his company will try to make Iran its manufacturing hub in the Middle East and Africa in future.Quemard said that his company plans to offer 30 percent of its joint products with Iran Khordo Company (IKCO) in markets across the region.

“After two years of negotiations, we have reached satisfactory conclusions with IKCO,” Quemard said, “and all the expectations of the Iranian Ministry of In-dustry have been fully met.”

As he informed, the Peugeot-IKCO car-manufacturing company, known as IKAP, will make €400 million within the five next years and by the time being, each side has primarily fulfilled its commitments.

Answering a question on the losses Iran incurred when the French carmaker left the country in 2011 due to the inter-

national sanctions, the company’s official said that both sides have reached some conclusions and are implementing the signed contract in this regard.

As reported in mid-August, an of-ficial at Iran’s Ministry of Industry an-nounced that France’s Peugeot began compensating for its previous contract

with Iran.Amir Hossein Qanati, the director

general of Automobile and Automotive Industries Department at the Ministry of Industry, Mine and Trade, said the French company will make amends for all losses of earlier deals on the basis of a signed contract while the Iranian ministry re-quires that both parties fulfill their obliga-tions in full.”

“Peugeot will fully recompense Iran though not necessarily in cash payments,” underlined the official asserting that “the amount will be paid to Iran in the course of the agreement together with other ob-ligations like implementation and instal-lation of production lines as well as sales or exports.”

Peugeot had left Iran in 2011 and Iran has set punitive contracts for the French company. The company is obliged to pay €427.6 million as compensation and Peugeot’s final business share will be the very low figure of only 15 percent.

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Given the good political relations between Iran and Oman, India is trying to establish a link between Omani port of Duqm and Iranian port of Chabahar to boost connectivity.

India is now eyeing a role at Oman’s strategically lo-cated Duqm Port, which is being developed by the Sul-tanate of Oman along with a special economic zone as a regional economic hub.

Duqm is situated on the southeastern side of Oman and can be accessed from the Indian Ocean.

Neelima Vyas, the director for international affairs of Oman’s Sohar Port and Free Zone, said with India taking an interest in port development in the region, the idea was to develop an Iran-India-Oman link for sea trade.

In February this year Oman and Iran launched a separate shipping route between the Shahid Rajaee Port and Sohar Port to promote trade.

Moreover, with India jointly developing the Chabahar port in Iran in the vicinity, Oman is looking at develop-ing a logistics hub connecting India-Iran-Oman as a key gateway to the Persian Gulf and Central Asia.

India is jointly developing the Chabahar port in Iran that lies in the Gulf of Oman and is part of India’s efforts to increase connectivity with Afghanistan and Central Asia. India signed a tripartite agreement this year with Iran and Afghanistan to develop the port and has com-mitted $500 million for the project.

(Source: Business Standard)

Italy’s economy stagnated between April and June, a second GDP reading has confirmed, dealing a blow to the country’s Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, as campaign-ing steps up ahead of a key referendum in the autumn on constitutional reform.

The country’s statistics agency, Istat, confirmed on Friday that Italy’s economic recovery ground to a halt in the second quarter, having eked out growth of 0.3 per-cent in the first three months of the year. Economists had originally expected growth of 0.2 percent in the second quarter.

Year-on-year Italy’s economy grew 0.8 percent in the second quarter, a slight improvement on the previous

estimate of 0.7 percent growth.“Italian growth is slowing quite sharply,” noted econo-

mists at Citi.“This is quite surprising given still very supportive

monetary policy and the loosened fiscal stance. We had expected the fiscal incentives introduced with the 2016 Budget would have supported a more vigorous recov-ery business investment. Sharp declines in equity prices and related concerns about the stability of the banks are probably weighing on consumption and investment de-cisions, via negative wealth effects, in our view,” they said.

“In addition, the export slowdown probably also af-fected investment decisions. Recent survey-based indi-

cators do not point to much improvement in activity over the coming months, with the manufacturing PMI falling into contractionary territory in August, 2016 growth will at best average 0.7 percent, in our view, and 2017 aver-age growth will likely to be lower than that (we currently project 0.3 percent),” they added.

Italy wasn’t the only country in the Eurozone to suffer a bad second quarter – France’s economy also came to a standstill between April and June – but the timing of the data is bad for Renzi, who has staked his political future on November’s referendum. The former mayor of Florence has threatened to resign if he loses the vote.

(Source: FT)

India trying to establish a link between Iranian, Omani ports

Italy’s economic recovery stalls, GDP data confirm

Iran’s 5-month iron concentrate output up 20% yr/yr

TEHRAN — Production of iron concen-trate witnessed 20 percent growth in Iran

during the first five months of the current Iranian calendar year (March 20-August 21) compared to the same period of time in the previous year.

According to the Public Relations Department of Iranian Mines and Mining Industries Development and Renovation Organization (IMIDRO), the country produced 12.453 mil-lion tons of iron concentrate during the mentioned time, while the figure was 10.336 million tons in the first five months of the past year, Tasnim news agency reported on Monday.

The report also said that Iran’s iron granules output fell 13 percent to 2.570 million tons in the first five months of this year from 2.954 million tons in the same period of time in the preceding year.

Mexican business delegation to embark for Tehran on Sept. 19

TEHRAN — A delegation of some Mexi-can companies is scheduled to travel to

Tehran on September 19 in a bid to find Iranian partners, the portal of Iran Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines and Agriculture (ICCIMA) published on Sunday.

The delegates will comprise traders and businessmen from different sectors including oil and gas, environmental friendly fuels, food stuff, pharmaceutical products, medical equipment, transportation, consultation services in construc-tional industry, and logistic services.

Foreign business delegations have flocked to Tehran since the United States, European Union and United Nations lifted international sanctions in January after reaching a deal over Iran’s nuclear program. A number of global companies have already signed business deals with Iran, which had been closed for years.

Minerals, mining exports from Iran up 23% in Mar.-Aug.

TEHRAN — The worth of minerals and mining exports from Iran witnessed 23

percent rise during the first five months of the current Ira-nian calendar year (March 20-August 21), compared to the same period of time in the previous year, Fars news agency reported on Sunday citing Iranian Mines and Mining Indus-tries Development and Renovation Organization (IMIDRO).

According to IMIDRO, the country’s minerals and mining exports stood at $2.9 billion in the mentioned time, while the figure was $2.3 billion in the first five months of the past year.

Back in June, Ministry of Industry, Mines and Trade an-nounced that mineral products and industries accounted for 16.5 percent of the country’s non-oil exports during the past Iranian calendar year (ended on March 19).

The value of exports from the country’s mining sector ex-ceeded $7 billion in the past year.

Mehdi Karbasian, the head of IMIDRO, announced in July that 34 mining and mineral industries projects will become operational in the country by his organization by the end of the current Iranian calendar year (March 20, 2017).

He put the worth of investment to complete the men-tioned projects at $7.2 billion.

In early May, the IMIDRO head said that Iran offers $40 billion investment opportunities to the foreign entities for de-velopment of its mining sector.

Russia-China economic and trade partnership falters“The relations between the two countries are at an … unprec-edented level,” Russian President Vladimir Putin declared in a televised address in May 2015.

But despite their 2,600-mile border, a gulf separates the two countries’ economies.

Russian-Chinese trade fell by 5 percent year-on-year to $28 billion in the first six months of 2016, mainly because of plummeting prices for commodities such as oil, gas, lumber, metal and coal, Russia’s main exports. At the same time, the U.S. remains China’s most important economic relationship with bilateral trade between the two hitting $263 billion in the first half of this year.

According to Gilbert Rozman, an expert on Asia at Prince-ton University, Russia “exaggerated the prospects for an alli-ance too soon.”

In theory, Chinese lenders and investors were expected to help compensate for the Western sanctions over Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula and alleged med-dling in that country’s civil war.

But those sanctions hit Russia hard.In 2014, European Union-Russian trade stood at $377 bil-

lion, making the bloc Moscow’s most important economic relationship. That fell to $235 billion last year.

Part of the problem for Russia its Far East is an underde-veloped, depopulating region with a mere 6 million inhabit-ants that is connected to Europe only by one railway line — the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

(Source: NBC News)

HERITAGE & TOURISMh t t p : / / w w w . t e h r a n t i m e s . c o m SEPTEMBER 13, 2016SEPTEMBER 13, 2016 5I N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L Y

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TEHRAN — The Na-tional Museum of Iran

in downtown Tehran has put over 100 prehistoric objects on display that are connected to the Mannai civilization, which was once flourished in north-western Iran in 1st millennium BC.

“Potteries, glazed bricks, bronze works, ivory carvings, and bone pen-dants are amongst the relics that are on show,” the director of the museum was quoted as saying by ILNA on Monday.

Organized in collaboration with the Kermanshah Cultural Heritage, Tourism, and Handicraft Department and Ziwiye Cultural Heritage Base, the exhibit will be running through

November 18. Mannai, also spelled Manna, was

an ancient country surrounded by three major powers of the time name-ly Assyria, Urartu, and Media.

According to the Encyclopedia Bri-tannica, the Mannaeans are first re-corded in the annals of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III (reigned 858–824 BC) and are last mentioned in Urartu by Rusa II (reigned 685–645 BC) and in Assyria by Esarhaddon (reigned 680–669 BC).

With the intrusion of the Scythians and the rise of the Medes in the 7th century, the Manneans lost their iden-tity and were subsumed under the term Medes.

Mannai civilization on display at National Museum of Iran

UNDER VISITORS’ EYES Isfahan Music Museum

TEHRAN — Isfahan Music Museum fea-tures roughly 300 traditional musical instru-

ments, those that are currently being played or used to be practiced across Iran.

The private museum, named after the central Iranian city, has been divided into two main sections dedicated to the national and regional musical instruments.

Visitors to the museum can audition live performances of traditional and classical Iranian pieces or join workshops on how such time-honored instruments are being crafted.

It also offers brief information about maestros, composers and musicians who are made contributes to enrich the music scene of the country in the course of history.

Isfahan Music Museum opened its doors to the public in 2015 under the auspices of the Cultural Heritage, Handcrafts and Tourism Organization.

Here is a select of comments that visitors to the museum have posted to TripAdvisor, one of the most popular travel websites in the world:

“Don’t even think of not visiting”I’m not particularly interested in music instruments, but

my guide insisted I should visit. I followed his advice and would have been an idiot not to do so.

I ended up spending almost 2 hours visiting and being enthused by the stories told by the private museum guide whilst both admiring and listening to wonderful instruments. A very unique place to visit when you are in Isfahan!

(FrenchTraveler001 from Paris, visited August 2016) “Captivating”

An absolutely beautiful experience with nice guides who gave a detailed explanation about each musical in-strument, and even though I don’t play music the visit was extremely fun and I would highly recommend it to anyone visiting Isfahan.

The highlight of the visit was the mini concert played at the end of the tour.

(Lemoclemo from Kuwait, visited August 2016) “A music museum that’s alive”

I have visited many music museums but this has many added extras. Firstly the collection itself. It is very compre-hensive and has several key historic instruments, even recog-nized by UNESCO.

Secondly, the staff are skilled performers themselves and speak informatively and enthusiastically…

(Cmeikle245 from Yorkshire, United Kingdom, visited Au-gust 2016)

“Wonderful”Music museums are everywhere, but Isfahan Music Mu-

seum is one of the most interactive and unforgettable ones I have visited.

Almost all displayed musical instruments are touchable and playable by visitors accompanied by friendly staff who give clear explanation on the instruments’ backgrounds and uses all the way…

(Dleung2016 from Hong Kong, visited July 2016)

British holidaymakers could be forced to pay to travel to Europe, home secretary admitsBritish holidaymakers could be forced to pay for visas to travel to Europe as a trade-off for the Brexit vote, the home secretary has admitted.

Amber Rudd said she could not “rule out” the introduction of a scheme which would force those from outside the EU to pay for visas. The plan, currently being considered by EU na-tions, emerged over the weekend and on Sunday Ms. Rudd suggested that Britain could be prepared to accept visas as a price worth paying during the Brexit negotiations.

But she warned that the UK could retaliate and create a similar system if British citizens were hit with a charge to travel to countries like France and Spain.

Critics have branded the scheme, which could cost around £10 per person, a “holiday tax” and called on Theresa May to rule it out.

But asked about plans for a European Union visa yester-day the Home Secretary said the British people would be “surprised” at being forced to pay.

She added: “I don’t think it’s particularly desirable but we don’t rule it out because we have to be allowed a free hand to get the best negotiation.”

She said: “It’s a reminder that this is a two-way negotiation.“The EU and the Commissioners may be considering al-

ternatives - they will be considering their negotiations with us, just as we are considering it with them.”

The plans, which have been drawn up by the European Commission, are similar to the American ESTA model where travelers have to pay $14 and apply online before they are allowed to enter the United States.

It would mean anyone entering the 26-nation Schengen pass-port-free travel zone, of which the UK is not part, would have to pay for a visa waiver if their home nation is not part of the agreement.

(Source: The Telegraph)

PICTURE OF THE DAY

A combination photo shows some details of both the interior and the facade of the 19th-century Khorshid historic house in the heart of Isfahan, Iran, June 21, 2016. The word Khorshid means the sun in English.

Tehran Times/ Narges Abbasi Bali witnesses growth in Indian

tourists Bali has witnessed around 55.47% growth in Indian tourists visiting the country during the first six months of 2016 as compared to the same period last year, according to the Bali Tourism Promotion Board (BPPD).

During January-June this year, 92,519 Indian tourists have travelled to Bali as compared to 59,509 tourists for the same period last year.

India is ranked 6th for inbound visitor ar-rivals in 2016 for Bali, figures during the first six months of 2016 clearly reflect.

Gilda, Executive Director, BPPD Bali, said, “The growth in arrivals could be achieved by the marketing efforts of India Representative office – Representation World.”

“The luxury and leisure market for Bali is on the rise as Bali offers all that luxury, lei-sure and honeymooner travelers are look-ing,” said Monica, Brand Ambassador for Bali Tourism Promotion Board for India.

“Our focus on MICE segment, the market-ing support for BPPD Bali, support from Em-bassy and Consulate, the aggressiveness of our partners in Bali Indonesia... ,” said Vineet Gopal, Director- India, Bali Tourism Promo-tion Board.

(Source: Travel News Digest)

TEHRAN — A collection of handmade jewelries by promising Iranian artisan

Hadi Ebrahimi is currently on show at the Cultural Herit-age, Tourism, and Handicrafts Organization (CHTHO).

Over 70 traditional silver rings embellished with tur-quoise, agate or other semi-precious stones form the back-bone of the display, the CHTN website reported on Sunday.

The exhibit that also includes workshops on various

techniques for making the signet rings, will come to end on Wednesday.

Silver was first mined as far back as 4000 BC and rings made of it were worn as decoration as symbols of pros-perity for centuries.

Many historians believe that the humble silver ring has been used as a symbol representative of eternity for centuries and in many traditions.

CHTHO hosting handmade jewelry exhibit

Thai Health officials have expressed fears that the Zika virus will have a negative impact on the coun-try’s booming tourism industry.

“If we say which province has infections [of Zika] then attention will turn on that province, and if that province is popular with tourists it will have an im-pact on tourism,” Anuttarasakdi Ratchatatat, an epi-demiologist at the health ministry’s Bureau of Vector Borne Disease, told Reuters.

There have been 100 confirmed cases in Thailand since January. Twenty-two new cases of Zika were confirmed in Bangkok alone last Sunday.

Thai authorities also reported monitoring 30 pregnant women infected by the mosquito-borne

virus. The health ministry told Reuters six women have given birth without complications so far.

Samlee Pliangbangchang, former regional direc-tor of WHO’s Southeast Asia office told Reuters, “We don’t know the extent of the Zika spread in Thailand.”

However, recent maps by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDPC) sug-gests “increasing or widespread transmission” of the virus in the country, which, with its tropical climate and rainfall, provides ideal breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

Thailand welcomed nearly 30 million visitors in 2015, making it one of the world’s top destinations.

(Source: Time)

From Sept. 22 to 27, the International Federation for Journalists and Writers (FIJET) will hold its annual meeting in Moscow for the first time. More than 150 participants from 30 countries are expected to attend.

The FIJET Congress is taking place with the support of the Department of National Policy, Inter-Regional Relations and Tourism of the city of Moscow.

During the Congress, in addition to attending seminars on the latest trends in domestic and international tourism,

attendees will have the chance to partici-pate in unique sightseeing tours.

Guests will visit the Moscow Kremlin and its unique architectural ensemble, tour the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and see the opening ceremony of the Circle of Light international multimedia festival.

The tour program will give foreign journalists a special opportunity to dis-cover the possibilities Moscow offers, see first-hand the city’s new tourist infrastruc-ture and get at the chance to know the

Russian capital, which many have experi-enced only through their colleagues.

Almost a year ago, on Sept. 29, 2015, Moscow was awarded the FIJET Golden Apple award, which recognizes “supe-rior efforts in promoting and raising the level of tourism.”

The Golden Apple has been presented annually since 1970 to an organization, city, country, local destination, object or person for outstanding contribution to the promo-tion and development of tourism.

An official FIJET delegation, includ-

ing the organization’s president Tijani Haddad, visited Moscow last year to pre-sent the award. The delegation included famous writers and journalists from France, Bulgaria, Croatia, Belgium, Pan-ama and Tunisia, among other countries.

FIJET was established in 1954 in Paris. Soviet and, later Russian, journalists be-gan participating in the organization starting in 1968. Today the group has more than 800 members representing 30 countries around the world.

(Source: Russia Beyond The Headlines)

Thailand is growing concerned that Zika may start to impact tourism

Moscow to host international tourism congress for the first time

This colored-glazed tile depicting human-headed bird with the horns of an ibex is an exemplar of the Mannaeans art. The object which dates back to 800 BC, was excavated in Bukan, western Iran, and currently is on show at the National Museum of Tokyo.

A municipal worker fumigates a residential area in Bangkok against the Aedes aegypti mosquito, carrier of Dengue and Zika virus, Bangkok on February 5, 2016.

e exhib l be running through term Medes.

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Tehran Times/s

SEPTEMBER 13, 2016SEPTEMBER 13, 20166 I N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L Y

INTERNATIONAL h t t p : / / w w w . t e h r a n t i m e s . c o m

By Nick Cohen

Selling of Donald J. Trump

In their struggle to understand the Trump phenomenon, establishment pundits, political scientists and millions of flabbergasted American voters have settled on a long list

of sober-sounding socioeconomic explanations: Deindustri-alization. Anomie. Racial animosity. The rising up of a dislo-cated America.

Perhaps. Surely, Donald J. Trump is where he is because of a new force in American politics, one very different from the old politics as usual. But the difference is not just socio-economic.

It’s much deeper than that. Mr. Trump has survived dis-asters that would have sunk an establishment politician be-cause he and his supporters have a fundamentally different worldview.

Mr. Trump isn’t just the first reality-TV candidate; he is the first candidate to embrace a slice of the country that sees everything, even the fate of the nation, through the logic of cutthroat American capitalism.

The world that Mr. Trump inhabits is today’s Other Ameri-ca, the seamy, blustering, hustling and huckstering underside of our fabled brightness and optimism.

For those who can afford to idealize politics, it may seem alien. But for many people, it is everyday life.

The political and business worlds have always overlapped. But we used to — and the establishment still does — ex-pect politicians to adhere to a minimal level of honesty and consistency. We judge business tycoons differently; within the confines of the law, more or less, we expect them to lie and cheat their way to the top, and we assess them solely on how quickly and efficiently they get there.

The reputation of Ulysses S. Grant was tarnished by the mere association with the unseemly practices that earned his Gilded Age counterparts in the business world everlasting glory.

Perhaps it was only a matter of time before someone with the plutocrat’s professional ethics made that leap into presi-dential politics.

But the rest of the country had to catch up. We lauded robber barons like John D. Rockefeller and Jay Gould for their business success, but no one suggested for a second that they were statesman material.

Now, in an era when the market reaches deep into our private lives and even high school students are expected to be experts in self-marketing, the door is finally open. Enter Donald Trump.

He thrives where others flail. His rivals — including Hillary Clinton — have had to submit to their vocation as politicians and try to sell their character and integrity. Mr. Trump has had to sell only the idea of his success, which, according to the modern law of transitive properties, will make everyone who embraces him successful, too.

No wonder, according to reports, that Mr. Trump pos-sesses such a fondness for McDonald’s, whose motto is “I’m lovin’ it.” The pitch requires no argument, no evidence, no complex rhetoric. You’re gonna love our burgers because the fact that billions of them have been sold proves the validity of the claim. You’re gonna love Mr. Trump because millions of Americans already do.

Seen in the light of modern commerce, Melania Trump’s lifting of lines for her convention speech from a speech by Michelle Obama had nothing improper about it. Success builds on success. There was nothing unusual about Mr. Trump’s acceptance speech in Cleveland, either.

Personal storyPeople were astonished that he did not tell a touching

personal story, as all politicians do, and as Ronald Reagan did to consummate effect. Products, though, have no personal past or any kind of human dimension.

A winning product is a result of the seller’s rigid, inflexible, even fanatical belief in the consistent quality of his merchandise.

The same goes for Mr. Trump’s bald lies at last week’s na-tional security forum. He denied, despite hard evidence, that he ever supported the Iraq war. Pundits were dismayed. But his supporters love him all the more for his brazen adherence to the integrity of his “brand” over minor details like the truth.

Yet Mr. Trump seems to suffer from a manufacturing de-fect. Republican leaders seem to want to recall him as though he were a faulty airbag. And it’s unlikely that enough Ameri-cans will buy his marketing pitch for him to win in November.

Imagine, though, a different figure, someone with Mr. Trump’s callousness but without the thin skin, lack of self-con-trol and fragile, oversize ego.

Imagine, in other words, a demagogue who embodies the dynamics of America’s pervasive commercial atmosphere, but who is smart, cunning, self-aware and self-disciplined — so cunning that he would, say, embrace the parents of Capt. Humayun Khan with the slightest trace of a wink to his or her followers, and then, once elected, close the door to any Muslim who wished to immigrate to America.

Imagine this same figure prefacing an insinuation that Mrs. Clinton be assassinated with a heartfelt declaration of her decency and good faith.

We had better prepare for such a person. In business, Mr. Trump might be called a beta test, or a “proof of concept.” To that end, he has already succeeded.

Trumpism — not the political ideology rooted in xeno-phobia and nationalism, but the cynical worldview that sees politics, like everything, as a market to be conquered — is not going anywhere. (Source: The NYT)

We all remember where we were when the planes hit the World Trade Center — and then the

Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania — 15 years ago last Sunday.

I was barely 20 years old, offshore in the Bay of Biscay as a volunteer able-bodied crewmember on a square red sailing ship for disabled people. Immedi-ately, one had the feeling that the destiny of millions of people – perhaps many I knew – had been immediately changed.

For the officials in authority, it was like-ly even more jarring. For them, it meant nothing less than changing the way the West approached the world.

The “kaleidoscope has been shaken” British prime minister Tony Blair told the Labour Party conference less than a month later in a speech that promised to “reorder the world.”

We will never know, of course, what might have happened if the West had re-sponded differently.

Over the years, though, as every anni-versary has passed, I’ve been struck by an ever-growing nagging thought: Did the reflexive response – perhaps even over-reaction – make matters worse?

That’s not to minimize the human tragedy – or, perhaps as important, the psychological impact of the assault. Nor is it to say the West should have ignored the threat from Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and terrorists’ militancy in general.

But with the distance of time, there seems a rather jarring mismatch between what actually happened and how we re-sponded.

I was as guilty of that as anyone else. It’s not that most of us necessarily saw a dramatic increase in Western military involvement in the region – Iraq as well as Afghanistan – as being a necessary response to what had just happened. It’s just that it felt inevitable.

High-casualty attacksFor years, many had known that the

risk of high-casualty attacks was growing. Militants had struck the Twin Towers before, with a 1993 car bomb that killed six peo-ple and wounded more than 1,000. Later, the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania demonstrated the attackers’ ever-growing reach. So did the attack on USS Cole in October 2000.

The technology used in these attacks was never particularly sophisticated – bombs crammed into trucks and boats. What al Qaeda was getting ever better at, however, was identifying points of vulner-ability and exploiting them to increasingly devastating effect.

The death of almost 3,000 people on 9/11, however, left U.S. intelligence and military chiefs feeling blindsided. Hav-ing failed to prevent the attack – or even predict one of such scale – they abruptly revised many of their expectations. “9/11 was seen as something which might take place every week,” one former senior se-curity official told me a decade later.

When Blair, in particular, comes back

to justifying and explaining the Iraq inva-sion, that’s the core of his argument. Al Qaeda killed 3,000 on 9/11, but if they had been able to kill 3 million he said, they would have done so. The threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, there-fore, could not be allowed to continue.

With hindsight, this was nonsense. Leaving aside the desperately imperfect knowledge of what Iraq might or might not have had, it assumed the conse-quences of invasion were easy to predict.

Philosophically, there was a substantial gap between right-wing neoconserva-tives such as vice president Dick Cheney and more neoliberal interventionists such as Blair. Yet they came to the same conclusion: A more assertive military ap-proach was central to both protecting the West and pushing back militancy by improving conditions in the poorer and more volatile regions of the world.

That thinking continued past president George W. Bush and Blair into the Barack

Obama and David Cameron administra-tions. Both endorsed their own regime change operations in Libya after the Arab Spring. And both made the same dis-covery – intervening is complicated, and sending large numbers of Western troops on theoretically time-limited missions in-evitably achieves less than the planners hoped.

Nor, crucially, has it done much to significantly reduce the threat of militant attacks. Though the West had, until the attacks of the last two years, largely es-caped more than occasional – if bloody – bombings, thousands died as militant groups instead struck in states such as Pakistan, Nigeria and, of course, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sea change in Western thinkingWhat we’ve now seen is something

of a sea change in Western thinking. The military interventions now under-way – against Islamic State (the terrorist group) in Iraq, the air strikes in Somalia,

the much smaller campaign in Afghani-stan – have a different flavor. For better or worse, the driving force is usually the local government. When U.S. and allied troops and officials join the effort, it is in a supportive role rather than with the ambition of temporarily dominating the country before withdrawing. That makes more sense – even if political and mili-tary leaders have little appetite for talking about previous failures and just why they changed their tactics.

Working through local forces and power structures was, ironically, at the heart of the initially impressively success-ful 2001 operation to topple the Afghan Taliban. Those lessons, though, were swiftly lost against the backdrop of more grandiose, militarily conventional ambi-tions in Iraq.

The one place this strategy does not work is Syria. There, the United States remains desperately conflicted about whether it still wishes to bring down the government. It also finds itself squaring off against other governments, includ-ing Iran, Russia and now Turkey that have very different perspectives and opinions.

The irony is that while so much of the intellectual and financial energy has gone into the larger wars since 9/11, the West has actually had considerable success on the counterterrorism front. Al Qaeda was gradually dismantled, Bin Laden eventu-ally found and killed. Through surveillance, intelligence, Special Forces troops and drones, militant operations have been dis-rupted.

None of that prevented the rise of the terrorist group, which is now finding new techniques to hurt the West, particularly by radicalizing individuals or tiny groups who can conduct hard-to-stop low-tech mass casualty attacks. But that shouldn’t be surprising. Like using antibiotics to treat an infection, there will always be virulent new strains requiring a different treatment.

It’s easy to say that attacks – and at-tackers – should be found and neutral-ized long before they strike. But that’s never going to be entirely possible. What’s important is to keep an eye on the real dangers and the real tools to mitigate them: limiting availability of weapons, not alienating large segments of the popula-tion so that they report potentially radi-calized individuals. We need to avoid an overreaction that ends up polarizing so-ciety, deepening divisions and just mak-ing everything worse. In Europe, unfor-tunately, things seem to be going exactly the opposite way.

The ultimate strategic bungle that opened the door to the attacks on New York and Washington was alarmingly ba-nal. It should never have been possible for passengers on aircraft to be carrying lethal edged weaponry like the box-cutters used to kill the pilots. Nor should the attackers have been able to get access to the cockpit.

Still, 15 years after that terrible day, I can't help but wonder if we might have achieved more by simply doing less.

(Source: Reuters)

What the West got wrong after 9/11

By Peter Apps

When Blair, in particular, comes back to justifying and explaining the Iraq invasion,

that’s the core of his argument. Al Qaeda killed 3,000 on 9/11, but if they had been able to kill

3 million he said, they would have done so.

The urge to bluster is universal among reckless men who have risked everything. They boom that events have proved them right, as if booming can

drown the thought that they have made a colossal error. As their mistakes can cause the worst damage, politicians, propagandists and the politically committed in general are the worst blusterers of all.

The front page of the Daily Express of 8 August 1939 contains one of the finest blusters in British history. Lord Beaverbrook, the proprietor, had so supported appeasing Hitler he dropped Winston Churchill from his pages for warning of the Nazi threat.

Beaverbrook and his journalists were desperate to prove that they had not betrayed their country. Under the headline “No War This Year”, the Express assured its read-ers that no less an authority than “Mr. Selkirk Panton”, its Berlin correspondent, believed that “Herr Hitler, despite all his mysticism, is a hard-headed, hard-boiled politician … he will not risk everything over some hasty action”.

On 1 September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. On 3 September, Britain and France declared war on Germany. As luck would have it, on 3 September 2016 – 77 years to the day after its “no war this year” prediction failed so spectacularly – the print edition of the Express led with the headline that Britain was in a “Brexit boom”. Along with the rest of the rightwing press and the politicians who have led us to this pass, the Express is loud in its insistence that the “doom mongers” had been proved wrong.

Now, as then, we see the same desperation to be-lieve that the Conservatives have not betrayed their country and the same refusal to face reality. We are not in recession because the Bank of England has pumped cheap money into the economy with Weimaresque abandon and reduced interest rates to their lowest level ever.

Keynes’s “euthanasia of the rentier” is upon us and might be an appealing prospect if the rentiers whose in-terest payments were vanishing were the misers of 19th-century fiction. As everyone saving for a pension is a rentier now, however, the Brexit “boom” rests on the bank ordering a miserable future for millions.

Brexit campaignThe lie direct of the Brexit campaign was that the Euro-

pean Union cost us £350m a week. The bigger lie, which some Leave supporters may even have believed, was that there were no hard choices. We could have it all. Immi-gration controls, prosperity, access to EU markets, without compliance with EU laws … whatever we wanted, at no cost at all.

Or as Boris Johnson, a politician who has never made the mistake of believing what he says, told his credulous supporters: “This is a great country and great economy and I think people know we can do brilliantly if we take back control.”

An honest version of Johnson (if you can imagine such a creature) would have gone to the Nissan car workers in Sunderland and said words to the effect of: we may be able to deliver the immigration controls you want if we

leave the single market but there is a risk that you will lose your jobs if we do.

The cynicism of Johnson, Gove and Farage’s failure to lay out the difficult decisions shocked the naive. But these men were charlatans fighting a campaign they were pre-pared to win without honor.

No government minister has gone to farmers in Wales, lorry drivers in Birmingham, Airbus engineers at Filton, let alone car workers in Sunderland, and warned them how the differences between a hard and soft Brexit could ruin their lives.

Tory politicians stay silent because they lack the intellec-tual honesty to say that Brexit has made Britain smaller. You can see us shrinking in the way leaders at the G20 treated Theresa May as an awkward “crasher” who had got in by mistake; in Japan’s undiplomatic hints that not just Nissan but all Japanese businesses in Britain will think about leaving if we leave the single market; and in America and Australia’s announcements that securing a trade deal with the EU came before securing trade deals with the UK.

Not that we can secure trade deals just like that. If you wish to get a measure of the mess we are in, read the pa-pers Nick Clegg has produced on the hair-raising practical obstacles ahead.

The right promised it would free us from “Brussels red tape”, to quote one example among many. Yet a new trade deal will result in “significantly more red tape for British companies exporting to the EU as British exporters will have to obtain proof of origin certificates from their national customs authorities”, certificates that will increase trade costs with the EU by between 4% and 15%.

Striking agreementsWe cannot strike agreements with 50 countries cur-

rently covered by our EU arrangements until we strike a trade deal with the EU, because everyone else will want to know where we stand.

We won’t strike a deal with the EU, for – what? – three, five 10 years? How many jobs will be lost and foreign in-vestors driven away in the process is a subject the prime minister needs to start talking about.

Instead of facing up to the scale of the uncertainty, today’s Conservatives kid themselves as their ancestors did in the 1930s. Listen to Conservative ministers and read the right-wing press and delusion is on display everywhere. 9

Why would the EU appease the deluded Brexiters?

Boris Johnson, a politician who has never made the mistake

of believing what he says, told his credulous supporters: “This

is a great country and great economy and I think people know we can do brilliantly if

we take back control.”

Boris Johnson

By Lee SiegelF E AT U R E

N E W S

ENERGYh t t p : / / w w w . t e h r a n t i m e s . c o m / e c o n o m y SEPTEMBER 13, SEPTEMBER 13, 20162016 7I N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L Y

Iran’s 5.5-month petchem output rises 7% y/y

By: Tim Daiss

TEHRAN — The volume of petrochem-ical products produced by Iranian com-

plexes rose by seven percent to reach 23 million tons in the first 5.5 months of the current Iranian calendar year (March 20-September 5), Shana reported on Monday.

Iran’s National Petrochemical Company (NPC) director for production control, Ali-Mohammad Bossaqzadeh, told Shana that the mentioned volume is the total output of 47 petrochemical complexes across the country, of which the output of 29 complexes has risen compared to the past year.

“Considering the fact that the first six months of the year is the period for overhaul in most petrochemical complex-es, the increase in output is outstanding,” he said.

The board member of the National Petrochemical Company said it is expected that in the second half of the current year along with increase in production, the target levels for sales and exports will also be reached.

In NPC’s latest report released in September 10, the total volume of petrochemicals output for the first five months of current Iranian calendar year (March 20-Au-gust 21) was reported 21.238 million tons. This figure has reached 23 million tons by mid Shahrivar (the sixth Iranian calendar month which started on August 22).

Petrochemical products comprised the largest por-tion of Iran’s non-oil exports during the first five month of the current Iranian calendar year.

According to Mohammad-Hassan Peyvandi, the pre-vious deputy managing director of NPC, Iran plans to raise its petrochemical production to over 180 million tons in a course of ten years.

Iran’s power generation capacity reaches 75,549MW

TEHRAN — With 866 megawatts (MW) of new capacity added to the coun-

try’s power grid by mid Shahrivar (Iranian sixth calendar month which started on August 21), Iran’s nominal power generation capacity reached 75,549 MW, Tasnim report-ed on Monday.

According to the report, during the mentioned period 834 MW of new capacity from gas power plants and 32 MW from distributed power stations have been added to the pre-vious 74,683 MW capacity of the country.

Earlier this month Iran’s Power Generation, Transmission and Distribution Management Company, known as Tavanir, announced that the country plans to increase the capacity of power generation by its distributed power stations to 4,000 MW by the end of its Sixth Five-Year National Development Plan (2021).

Oil prices fall as U.S. drillers add new rigs, speculators cut long positionsCrude prices fell over 1.5 percent on Monday after U.S. oil drillers added rigs to look for new production as producers adapt to cheaper crude, with speculators cutting positions betting on further price rises.

Brent crude futures were trading at $47.29 per barrel at 0200 GMT (10:00 p.m. EDT), down 72 cents, or 1.5 percent, from their last settlement.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures were down 80 cents, or 1.74 percent, at $45.08 a barrel.

Traders said the price falls on Monday and Friday were a result of increasing oil drilling activity in the United States, which indicat-ed that producers can operate profitably around current levels.

“Each dollar is being used far more efficiently and, as a result, $50 oil appears much more palatable,” Barclays bank said in a note to clients.

U.S. drillers added oil rigs for a tenth week in the past 11, according to a Baker Hughes rig count report on Friday. It was the longest streak without rig cuts since 2011.

Speculative oil traders also became less confident of higher oil prices, cutting their net long U.S. crude futures and options positions for a second consecutive week last week, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) said on Friday.

(Source: Reuters)

Talk of oil production freezes and even production cuts have been tossed around so much lately among ana-

lysts, traders, pundits and major producers that it’s hard to keep up with who said what, and which comments to take seriously.

Against the backdrop of all of this conjecture is a more than two-year long global oil supply glut and price drop that has set the oil industry back on its heels. Lay-offs, bankruptcies and a gen-

eral souring of the industry has become a “new normal,” but prices have done any-thing but find a “new normal.”

Down from $114 a barrel in the summer of 2014, prices are bouncing around the mid to upper $40s range, with little reason to think that they will find a floor – which brings us to OPEC de facto leader Saudi Arabia and Russia, the world’s top two oil producers.

Ahead of an informal meeting of pro-ducers later this month in Algiers, the two oil producing juggernauts agreed a few

days ago to “agree” to do something about oil markets, possibly in hopes that rhetoric could help restore market equilibrium.

While headline grabbing announce-ments can indeed move markets, it’s always short lived, lasting usually a day or so, then the reality of the ongoing supply glut quan-dary kicks back in with corresponding pres-sure on prices.

As I pointed out in a post a few days ago, talk is cheap and what needs to happen is not more talk, or even a pro-duction cap at current levels, which are

still at record highs for OPEC producers and Russia, in spite of marginal pull-backs by OPEC the last few months.

Real production cuts need to be agreed to – something that has been so elusive in the past two years, that it’s getting hard to re-member just when major players could agree on anything of substance.

With a little less than four months left in the year, plenty of analysts and traders are giving updated analysis on where prices will be for the remainder of the year and 2017.

(Source: Forbes)

Oil traders see more pain for markets

ECONOMYd e s k

ECONOMYd e s k

SEPTEMBER 13, 2016SEPTEMBER 13, 20168 I N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L Y

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Many people believe that all stress is bad, but you may have heard that there’s “good stress” and “bad stress.” Do you know what people mean by that? We rarely hear people say, “I’m really feel-ing stressed -- isn’t that great?” But if we didn’t have some stress in our lives -- the ‘good stress’ variety -- we’d feel rudder-less and unhappy. If we define stress as anything that alters our homeostasis, for good or for bad, then good stress, in its many forms, is vital for a healthy life.

However, good stress can turn into bad stress, and vice-versa. Here’s what you need to know about good stress.

Good stress vs. bad stressSo-called “good stress,” or what psy-

chologists refer to as “eustress,” is the type of stress we feel when we feel ex-cited. Our pulse quickens, our hormones change, but there is no threat or fear. We feel this type of stress when we ride a roll-er coaster, gun for a promotion, or go on a first date. There are many triggers for this good stress, and it keeps us feeling alive and excited about life.

Another type of stress is acute stress. It comes from quick surprises that need a response. Acute stress triggers the body’s stress response as well, but the triggers aren’t always happy and excit-ing. This is what we normally think of as “stress.” Acute stress in itself doesn’t take a heavy toll if we find ways to re-lax quickly. Once the stressor has been dealt with, we need to return our body to homeostasis, or its pre-stress state, to be healthy and happy.

The type of stress we really have to worry about is chronic stress. This type of stress comes when we repeatedly face stressors that take a heavy toll and feel inescapable. A stressful job or an

unhappy home life can bring chronic stress. This is what we normally think of as serious stress. Because our bodies aren’t designed for chronic stress, we can face negative health effects (both physical and emotional) if we deal with chronic stress for an extended period of time.

Sources of good stressOkay, back to good stress. Know-

ing about the different types of stress, it makes sense to get more good stress into your life. Because you actually can get too much of even the good type of stress, it’s important to choose activities in your life that make you feel good, happy, and excited about life. It’s also a good idea to cut out as many activities as you can that drain you, or lead to the experience of chronic stress. One good way to gauge whether or not an activity

is worth your time is to pay attention to how the thought of it makes you feel. Do you feel excited at the thought? Is it a “want to” activity, or a “have to” ac-tivity? Be sure your “want to” activities are all things you really do want to do, and your “have to” activities are all ab-solutely necessary.

How good stress can become bad stress

I’ve alluded to it twice already: good stress can become bad for you if you experience too much of it. (Adrena-line junkies know this firsthand.) This is because your stress response is trig-

gered either way, and if you’re add-ing that to chronic stress, or several other stressors, there is still a cumu-lative effect: lots of stress! That’s why it’s important to be in tune with your-self and be able to tell when you’ve had too much. You may not be able to eliminate all stress, but there are often ways that you can minimize or avoid some of the stress in your life, and this can make it easier to handle the rest. Particularly if you can avoid the most taxing forms of stress, you’ll have more resilience against the types of stress in your life that are unavoid-able.

How bad stress can become good stress

Not all forms of bad stress can be-come good stress, but it is possible to change your perception of some of the stressors in your life, and this shift in perception can change your expe-rience of stress! This is because the body’s stress response reacts strongly to perceived threats; if you don’t per-ceive something as a threat, there is generally no threat-based stress re-sponse. If you perceive something as a challenge, the fear you would normally experience may turn into excitement and anticipation, or at least steeled re-solve. You can often make the shift in perception by focusing on resources, seeing the hidden potential benefits of a situation, and reminding yourself of your strengths. Getting into the habit of thinking like an optimist can also help. Once you are in the practice of look-ing at things as challenges more often, it becomes more automatic.

Overall, it’s important to have good stress in your life. By making the effor t to cut out as much chronic stress as possible, changing your perception of stress where you can, and adding some positive activities in the mix to promote eustress, you can create a nice balance of good stress in your life.

(Source: verywell.com)

M E D I C I N Eh t t p : / / w w w . t e h r a n t i m e s . c o m SEPTEMBER 13, 2016SEPTEMBER 13, 2016 9I N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L Y

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First ever hand reattachment performed in Bushehr

TEHRAN – A medical team in the city of Bush-ehr, southern Iran, successfully pulled off a hand

reattachment surgery for the very first time in the province, accord-ing to a statement released by Tohid Hospital on Monday.

Following a 5-hour taxing operation, a team of orthope-dists and general surgeons reattached the hand of a 30-year-old male, IRNA reported.

Based on the report, in a severe car accident, the crash survivor, riding a motorbike, had lost left leg and arm.

Once the docs stabilized the man’s condition, they began the operation that required administering 6 blood bags.

The patient, working toward recovery, is doing well and under close watch.

The type of stress we really have to worry about is chronic stress that comes when we repeatedly face stressors that take a heavy

toll and feel inescapable. A stressful job or an unhappy home life can bring chronic stress.

So-called “good stress,” or what

psychologists refer to as “eustress,” is the

type of stress we feel when we feel excited.

Good stress can become bad for you if you experience too

much of it.

C O M M E N T

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

A N A L Y S I S h t t p : / / w w w . t e h r a n t i m e s . c o m / i n t e r n a t i o n a lSEPTEMBER 13, SEPTEMBER 13, 20162016

In some articles about Donald J. Trump's controversial stances on various issues during his presiden-

tial campaign speeches, a few analysts have been arguing for months that Trump is a postmodern candidate, since he rejects all norms and rules of politics. For instance, owing to the fact that he has not raised almost any money or he would like to ignore being endorsed by GOP leaders and so on. These are few of many examples that have led a num-ber of analysts to come to the conclusion that Trump is a post-modern candidate. But, what do these positions and state-ments really describe? Modernism, post-modernism, or neither? Can showcasing the kids instead of Republican Party's big names, be regarded as a postmodern approach? Is insulting rival presidential campaign nominee - by using taboo words like "world-class liar" and "crook-ed" - during a presidential debate in accordance with post-modernist ration-ality? What should a person like this be called, while he is mocking and scoffing at all political norms and rules?

It seems, for a more detailed study of the issue, we first need a more pre-cise definition of both modernism and postmodernism. As a matter of fact, the emergence of modernism can be traced back to religious wars of Reformation and Counter-Reformation in the 16th-17th centuries that paved the way for ratification of the Peace of Westphalia signed on 24 October 1648, which brought to an end thirty years of war between Catholicism and Protestantism. Some characteristics of modernism in conformity with the Westphalian para-digm include: Nation-state building and the fact that every state has sovereignty over its territory and other states have to respect the principle of territorial in-tegrity. Self-sufficiency is the second one that modernist rationality proponents are trying to achieve. National security is the third characteristic and according to modernistic approach, a broad set of threats has surrounded national security. Frankly speaking, national security is a concept which developed mainly in the U.S. immediately following World War II, and generally means "the ability of a nation to protect its internal values from external threats." That is to say, national security is the protection of the state and citizens through different means: militar-ily, economically, and diplomatically. In short, in the realm of modernism, the strategy of national security becomes more and more a threat-based strategy.

The other cornerstone of the mod-ernistic approach is so-called "controlled

border" and border restrictions. Indeed, in accordance with modernism, every sovereign state has intended to impose harsh immigration restrictions on geo-graphical boundaries. Strictly speaking, in modernism, we are facing harsh immi-gration policies and a severe treatment by the border patrol members, which makes border crossing very difficult. Therefore, in modernism, the rules of geographical boundaries are drafted in such a way that are not in line with "free migration policy" and the "open border" idea. Truth be told, modernist rational-ity regards both "open border" and "free migration" policies as gravest threats to security and public safety. Nationalism is the next product of modernism. In ac-tuality, the creation of modern societies and Nation-State based on Westphal-ian model, has led to nationalism and formation of a kind of social solidarity, which promotes national unity and pat-riotism among the given members of a specific territory.

We have seen unique heritage and culture of different ethnic groups with-in distinguished geographical bounda-ries, in view of the fact that, the idea of nationalism advocates controlled borders and territorial integrity. Liter-ally, nationalism has the power to keep the people of one nation together and draw a red line between dissimilar na-tionalities. In a modern world, we have seen, clear national borders alongside strong traditional and national senti-ments among the people of one na-tion. Based on nationalist approach, every real nation must have precise and controlled borders, otherwise, it cannot be called a nation. Moreover,

nationalists believe that more safe-guards are needed for a nation's cultur-al heritage, which is sacred and whose safety cannot be guaranteed except by controlled borders. Likewise, they con-sider floods of mass immigration from other countries as a great menace to society's sacred cultural heritage.

After studying modernism and its various aspects, now it's time to analyze postmodernism and its dis-tinguished characteristics. Globaliza-tion is one of the prominent aspects of postmodernism. According to Anthony Giddens, a British sociolo-gist who is famous for his "structura-tion theory" and his holistic view of modern societies, "globalization is identified as the intensification of worldwide social relations which links distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa." Globalization has be-come a familiar enough word and its meaning has been discussed as the elimination of barriers, particularly geographical barriers to trade, com-munication, and culture exchange. So, in this framework, globalization can be considered a threatening fac-tor to nationalism, because this ap-proach doesn’t care about borders and regards nationalism as the mani-festation of the greed of individuals. Globalists believe the nation-state is an invalid and outdated phenom-

enon as well, owing to the fact that it has been found inefficient and left from an antique Westphalia order that no longer works. In truth, they dismiss Westphalia as an inadequate system and obsolete world order that has tried to interrupt or obstruct the formation of any integrated and in-terdependent world for centuries.

In a postmodern world, national-ism and the sense of belonging to a specific country have dwindled and as such, through increased interde-pendence, national and territorial barriers would be weakened between countries. In this regard, the founder of China Pro-Democracy Support Network, John Kusumi, argues that, "globalization is the anti-thesis of nationalism as it suggests that there are no boundaries, just one globe." That is, in the wake of diminishing borders and growing interaction be-tween people of different regions, postmodern citizens will be able to see a more integrated, more inter-dependent, and more troubled and conflicted world. For this reason, when more people of disparate na-tionalities come together and com-mence interactions, this eventually would lead to more disputes. With the blurring of borders, in addition to the easy movement of people around the globe, mixed cultures would rise instead of national cultures.

Furthermore, by implementing

"open borders policy", wealthy coun-tries would be flooded by immigrants from poorer countries and this policy's unintended consequences most likely will introduce many risks and security challenges to postmodern citizens. In such a world, everything becomes in-terdependent and all human beings will share the same fate, because the fate of one nation is linked to the fate of other nations.

Now, it's time to answer why Don-ald J. Trump has never been a post-modernist presidential candidate. As we discussed above, postmodernism challenges the existence of borders between countries, in particular geo-graphical boundaries, which accord-ing to modernist rationality, should be strictly controlled. Donald Trump believes that "a nation without bor-ders is not a nation”, and subse-quently suggests that "there must be a wall across the southern border". In actuality, according to Max Weber ar-gument, which implies politics as an isolated world of rational top-down decision making that exclusively be-longs to the political sector, Donald J. Trump eyes politics as a square of modernist top-down decision making process as well. Trump's eighteenth-century style mentality on national-ism, leads him towards strictly con-trolled borders with its neighbors and far-flung immigrants. He argues that "we are the only country in the world whose immigration system puts the needs of other nations ahead of our own" and "that must change." In oth-er words, Trump's conservative view-points on nationalism, gender, race, immigration, culture, and border security, recall the eighteenth-cen-tury America of White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant (WASP) founding fathers. And for this reason, Trump's white Anglo-Saxon Protestant model of behavior sets up a framework within which all the new immigrants have to be assimilated into the eighteenth-century style America.

Therefore, when we think of Donald J. Trump and his call for demonizing im-migrants and their families, deportation of undocumented Hispanics, and build-ing a wall along the border with Mexico, we find out that all of these perceptions have nothing to do with postmodernism and can actually be explained perfectly by Tharailath Koshy Oommen, Indian Professor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, who said "the rise and fall, the construc-tion and destruction of various types of boundaries is the very story of hu-man civilization." Likewise, his empha-size on "mono-cultural" nationalism, by

threatening to ban Muslims, Cubans, and Mexicans entering the U.S. along-side his presidential campaign slogan "Make America Great Again" – which has been derived from Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign slogan "Let's Make America Great Again" – all of this is a sign of his hyper-nationalism and his most conservative attitudes that proceeds from old-school modern-ism. In this sense, Donald Trump, as an ultra-conservative, not only doesn't believe in multi-culturalism and recog-nition of ethnic, linguistic, and cultural minorities' rights, but also he wants to go back to the days of pre-multicul-tural America, to a time prior to iden-tity politics and political correctness. Additionally, if we focus on Trump's presidential campaign programs, for instance, his immigration project, it is revealed that his favorite immigra-tion scheme is a plan which "must im-prove jobs, wages and security for all Americans" because in his viewpoints "a nation that does not serve its own citizens is not a nation." Now, follow-ing these explanations, we have come to realize that all Donald Trump talks about are to some extent modernistic-oriented issues without any mention of postmodernist issues.

Abbas Torabi has done his MA in North American Studies in Faculty of World Studies, University of Tehran.

Why has Trump

never been a postmodern candidate?

Bright future ahead Iran-France relations

Following the nuclear agreement clinched between Iran and P5+1 on July 2015, fresh round of cooperation have been launched between Tehran and the European countries.

In an indication of fostering relations between Iran and Europe, French National Assembly Claude Bartolone arrived in Tehran on Sept 6 to blow fresh air into Tehran-Paris relations, economic ties in particular. While in Iran Bartolone held separate talks with sev-eral high-ranking Iranian officials including Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani, President Hassan Rouhani, Foreign Minister Moham-mad Javad Zarif, Special Aide to Parliament Speaker for Inter-national Affairs Hossein Amir Abdollahian, Head of the Center for Strategic Studies affiliated to the Expediency Council Ali Ak-bar Velayati, Central Bank of Iran (CBI) Chief Valiollah Seif and a number of local officials in Isfahan.

Political Cooperation: Iran believes that European countries must play more active role

in settlement of political crisis in Syria and strongly rejected the di-chotomization of terrorism into good and bad forms anywhere in the world. Talking to Bartolone, Zarif underscored that the threat of terrorism is a global threat and Tehran believes in the international community’s more serious cooperation to remove this common threat, voicing Tehran's readiness to hold more consultations with Europeans, particularly France, about the crisis in Syria.

Iranian diplomat also added Tehran considers Paris as an “important partner in its economic relations”, reiterating that the two sides have common views on many regional issues.

Bartolone also said France attaches great importance to the full implementation of the nuclear agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), between Iran and the P5+1 group of countries. The French official noted that the JCPOA has opened up positive opportunities in Iran’s ties with other countries, saying that several European and French banks have started cooperation with Iran. In a meeting with Bartolone, President Rouhani called for coordinated and collective cam-paign against terrorism, adding there is no doubt that terrorism is a big danger for the regional countries and the entire world.

Rouhani said that as a victim of terrorism, the Islamic Republic of Iran is well aware of the magnitude of the threat of the dirty phenomenon and at the same time, France has well understood the momentous issue due to terrorist attacks over the past several months. He said that the Islamic Republic of Iran helps the Iraqi and Syrian governments on their own demand to fight terrorism.

Parliamentary Cooperation: In a meeting with Larijani, the two called for expan-

sion of parliamentary relations between Tehran and Paris and discussed regional and international developments. Speaking at a joint press briefing after the meeting, Lari-jani lauded the parliamentary ties between the two coun-tries and described Tehran-Paris relations as “good and age-old,” saying that the two countries share common views concerning the fight against terrorism and the reso-lution of current crises in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and other countries. Iranian parliament speaker also cited Bartolone’s trip to Iran as a "new page" in fostering bilateral coopera-tion. Commenting his talks with Larijani, Bartolone said the meeting has created suitable grounds to discuss issues of mu-tual interest, stressing that expansion of parliamentary relations would also help broaden ties between the two governments.

Economic Cooperation Talking to Seif, Bartolone called for improvement of banking co-

operation with Iran, adding France supports Iran to execute the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). FATF is an intergovernmental or-ganization founded in 1989 on the initiative of the G7 to develop policies to combat money laundering. Bartolone believes that Paris would help Tehran technically for implementation of the FATF by providing Iran with France experiences to this end. He also called for the boost of economic ties between the two countries, adding that Paris is committed to help complete implementation of JCPOA.

According to Seif, Italian, Austrian and German banks have developed cooperation with Iran in the post-sanctions era but France banking system is very cautious about improving bilater-al relations with its Iranian counterparts. France can help resolve the problem of obstacles on the way of Iran's banking relations with other countries regarding Paris significant place among the Euro-pean states, Seif stressed. However, the implementation of JCPOA has led to more economic and political cooperation with the out-side world to bring about prosperity and welfare for the nation.

So, a favorite opportunity has been available for the Europe-an states to develop economic cooperation in light of the inter-national understanding created between Iran and the European nations following the nuclear accord.

By Abbas Torabi

Donald Trump believes that “a nation

without borders is not a nation”, and

subsequently suggests that “there must

be a wall across the southern border”.

Donald Trump, as an ultra-conservative, not only doesn’t believe in multi-culturalism and recognition of ethnic, linguistic, and cultural

minorities’ rights, but also he wants to go back to the days of pre-multicultural America, to a time

prior to identity politics and political

correctness.

In a postmodern world, nationalism and the sense of belonging to a specific country have

dwindled and as such, through increased interdependence, national and territorial

barriers would be weakened between countries.

By Maryam Azish

S C I E N C Eh t t p : / / w w w . t e h r a n t i m e s . c o m SEPTEMBER 13, 2016SEPTEMBER 13, 2016 11I N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L Y

N E W SHumpback whales off the endangered category in the latest reviewEndangered since 1970, U.S. humpback whale population has bounced back and is no longer in the list of endangered species, unveiled federal authorities. Out of 14 different populations of humpback whales, nine have been removed from the endan-gered list of species.

International efforts have helped in reviving the species. Commercial whaling was banned internationally almost 50 years back, since then the population of these species started to increase steadily. However, the Marine Mammal Protection Act still applies to all the whales’ population regardless of their status; and their hunting practices continue to be banned.

Although, it’s great news for all who had been working hard to revive their population, the whales are not completely out of danger. Four of its species still form the part of endan-gered list and one is in the list of threatened species.

Phil Fernandez, President of Hawaii Fishermen's Alliance, stated, “We just saw a lot of whales. So we thought this is a success in ocean management and we wanted to point that out to the world - that things are good with whales in Hawaii”.

A group of environmentalists has affirmed that the pro-tection practices should stay in place, as the whale’s species still face several threats that include whaling, entanglement in fishing gear, habitat degradation, climate changes as well as contamination oil and gas.

During winters about 10,000 humpback whales which aren’t listed as endangered breed in Hawaii waters and travel to Alaska during summer times to feed, said the fisheries ser-vice. Whereas, the humpback species that breeds in Mexico and feeds in California, Alaska and the Pacific Northwest are listed as threatened. (Source: PerfScience)

Some people can take more of it than others. Yet we still need to measure pain, and so scientists have derived scales that are generally considered valid ways of assessing just how much one thing hurts compared to another.

When entomologist Justin Schmidt created the "Schmidt Pain Scale for Stinging Insects," he gave the world the first measure for comparing the pain of a yellowjacket sting ("Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W.C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue") to that of a tarantula hawk wasp ("Blinding, fierce, shockingly elec-tric. A running hair dryer has just been dropped into your bubble bath").

But as Schmidt mentions in his new delightful new book, "The Sting of the Wild," even his four point scale (a yel-lowjacket scoring a two, the tarantula hawk a full-on four) has limitations, as stings on different parts of the body hurt in different ways.

For example, Schmidt's base for the scale, a honey bee, generally rates a two: "Burning, corrosive, but you can handle it. A flaming match head lands on your arm and is quenched first with lye and then sulfuric acid."

But a honey bee sting on the back of the hand, he writes, is a very man-ageable 1.5. A sting on the tongue, on the other hand, is worth bump-ing up to a full three: "It's crawled into your soda can and stings you on the tongue. It's immediate, noisome, visceral, debilitating. For 10 minutes life is not worth living." So where do stings hurt the most?

A bee stingAfter reportedly suffering a bee

sting on that most sensitive of male body regions, the testicles, Smith was

struck with a curious question that — if this were not for science — would certainly cross the boundary into pure masochism.

Smith wanted to know where it hurt the most to be stung. He de-vised a plan to sting 25 different body parts, using guard bees from the same hive. He randomized the order of the stings so he'd let a bee sting each body part three times, for 60 seconds each time, enough to in-ject a full dose of venom. He received three experimental stings each day along with two daily "calibration" stings on the forearm.

He rated stings from one to ten (most painful), with a five being the middle ground. And since each body part was stung three times, he calcu-lated the average. Perhaps surprisingly — unless you've been stung in one of these spots — the nostril and upper lip beat out even those locations especial-ly painful for men.

One particularly impressive and or cringe-inducing thing about Smith's ex-periment is that he actually intention-ally stung himself each time — even Schmidt, creator of the notorious pain scale, received most of his stings inciden-tally while conducting other research.

(Source: Business Insider)

New research shows that bats waggle their heads from side to side – like tiny, flying puppies – when they’re listen-ing. This behavior, according to a study published Thursday in the journal PLOS Biology, may help bats locate prey more easily while echolocating.

The "sound is going to be hitting the ears in different ways throughout that dynamic process, and it's those differ-ences the bats exploit," study author Melville Wohlgemuth, a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University, told Live Science.

Over several acoustic studies, he be-gan to notice a strange routine: When hunting, some bats would cock their heads left and right, squeaking during the breaks. Suddenly reminded of his dog, Wohlgemuth set out to under-stand the purpose of the odd behavior.

But first, he had to teach his subjects to be lazy. Big brown bats, or Eptesicus fus-cus, are normally dynamic hunters. Able to reach speeds of up to 40 mph, these ani-mals can be difficult to study in flight.

So researchers trained a group of bats to sit on a platform and wait for food, which would be delivered via fishing wire.

High-speed camerasUsing high-speed cameras and reflec-

tive markers on each ear, Wohlgemuth and colleagues could later reconstruct the bats’ head movements.

In some trials, researchers would move the food in simple patterns. In others, they would deliver the food over complex paths and at changing speeds. When the prey moved more erratically or changed directions suddenly, the bats would waggle more frequently.

Wohlgemuth and colleagues con-clude that bats waggle to enhance their

sensory perception. Most true bats use sonar to hunt, which means they’re receiving constant auditory feedback from all directions. By changing the ori-entation of their ears, they can better localize those sounds.

"They have to be able to find that tiny little echo of the insect against all the other clutter echoes of the back-ground," Wohlgemuth told The Wash-ington Post. "So bats have these very robust and very dramatic behaviors."

It's an unusually simple answer, but re-cent research suggests that bat sonar may be just that: simple. Last year, scientists at the University of Antwerp and the Universi-ty of Bristol found that bat flight maneuvers were based on a simple left-right binary.

When an object is close, the corre-sponding echo is louder. So when a bat receives a comparatively loud signal in its left ear, it will respond by turning right to avoid the object, and vice-versa.

The new finding, researchers say, draws new connections between phys-ical movement and sensory processing in animals. Dogs, cats and even hu-mans exhibit similar, though subtler, be-haviors. The study also highlights par-allels between echolocation and vision. Just as our eyes do, bats’ ears provide spatial perception through movement.

(Source: The CSM)

How waggling heads help bats hear

Which body part hurts the most when stung by a bee?

Boeing is back in the wind tunnel testing one of its most innovative and potentially game-changing advanced concepts: the Blended Wing Body.

Testing is underway through the end of September at the NASA Langley Re-search Center 14- by 22-Foot Subsonic Tunnel in Virginia. Boeing and NASA researchers are using a 6 percent scale, 13-foot-wingspan Blended Wing Body (BWB) model to validate testing meth-odology, as well as map airflow over the airplane using lasers and smoke with a technique known as particle imagery ve-locimetry (PIV).

Time permitting, testing will be con-ducted to measure the effectiveness of various control surfaces. That data will be compared with and supplement the set of data collected over the last two years on the same model at NASA Langley and the much larger 40- by 80-foot subsonic tunnel at NASA Ames Research Center in California.

“Testing the same model in two very different tunnels gives us data to make our test methods better,” said Dan Vicroy, principal investigator at NASA Langley. “Plus these tests will let us do PIV – some-thing we didn’t do before."

A successful research“Our tests are a continuation of more

than two decades of successful research

and development of this concept, which is unparalleled in industry,” said John Bonet, Boeing’s test director for the BWB. “What we learn from this round of testing will be used to complete the definition of our aerodynamic, stability and control low-speed databases – a major milestone in the technology development of the concept.”

The BWB concept is unique in that it forgoes the conventional tube and wing shape of today’s airplanes, in fa-vor of a triangular tailless aircraft that effectively merges the vehicle’s wing and body.

It may not be just a concept for too much longer, according to company leaders.

Boeing sees potential for a BWB-type aircraft to be developed in the next 10 years as a subsonic transport, possibly beginning with military transport variants for airlift and aerial refueling, said John Dorris III, Mobil-ity senior manager, Phantom Works Fixed Wing Assembly for Boeing.

“By transferring technology and fea-tures from current Boeing programs –like the C-17 and KC-46 – we're able to ad-dress the U.S. Air Force's vision for 2030 and beyond," he said. "Boeing's Blended Wing Body concept can be scaled, with variants that will allow us to meet our customer's mission requirements and fleet demands."

Backed by decades of successful structural, wind tunnel and flight testing of two different X-48 aircraft configura-tions, Boeing is readying the BWB for the next step in maturing this technology: a manned demonstrator.

NASA’s Aeronautics budget propos-es the return of X-planes. Boeing has completed an extensive study of BWB X-plane options for NASA and is sup-portive of NASA’s desire to create a se-ries of manned demonstrators as part of its mission to advance the science of aviation for public benefit, said Naveed Hussain, vice president, Aeromechanics Technology, at Boeing.

(Source: nextbigfuture.com)

Boeing testing blended wing plane for potential new super-efficient subsonic plane within 10 years

Boeing sees potential for a BWB-type aircraft to be developed in the next 10 years as a

subsonic transport, possibly beginning with military transport variants for airlift and

aerial refueling.

The Osiris-Rex spacecraft begins chasing an asteroidNASA’s mission to grab pieces of an asteroid and bring them back to Earth took off on Thursday night.

“You’ll be glad to know we got everything just exactly perfect,” Dante Lauretta, the mission’s principal investigator, said at a news conference after the launch of the Osiris-Rex spacecraft.

The craft began its journey on top of an Atlas 5 rocket that lifted off into the summer sky above Cape Canaveral, Fla. Seven years from now, the craft is to return and parachute a capsule with the asteroid bits into a Utah desert, giving scientists a window to some of the material that made up the early Solar System, including some of the molecules that gave rise to life on Earth.

Twelve minutes after liftoff, the second-stage engine of the Atlas 5 shut off, leaving Osiris-Rex in orbit around Earth. After some coasting, the engine fired again to kick the spacecraft onto a path around the sun. After the craft separated from the second stage, it deployed its solar arrays and established communications with controllers on the ground.

The ”Osiris-Rex spacecraft is happy and healthy,” said Richard Kuhns, the program manager at Lockheed Martin, which built the spacecraft.

A year from now, Osiris-Rex will swing back around and make a close flyby of Earth, using the planet’s gravity to tilt the angle of its orbit to match that of Bennu, a carbon-rich asteroid that is 1,600 feet in diameter and has an orbit around the sun similar to Earth’s. It is about as wide as the Empire State Building is tall.

Osiris-Rex — a shortening of Origins, Spectral Interpre-tation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer — will catch up to Bennu in 2018, entering orbit for more than a year of observation to allow scientists to figure out where they want to scoop their sample. (Source: The NYT)

Russian scientists record dolphin conversation for the 1st timeThe interest of Russian scientists in dolphin research has paid off. After developing an underwater microphone capable of distinguishing different sea animal “voices,” they recorded for the first time a conversation between dolphins.

The talk was between Yasha and Yana, Black Sea bottlenose dolphins at the Karadag Nature Reserve in Feodosia, Russia. The researchers discovered the mammals altering the volume and frequency of pulsed clicks which form in-dividual “words” the dolphins string together into sentenc-es, similar to human speech.

Dr. Vyacheslav Ryabov, lead researcher, explains each pulse produced by the dolphins is different from the other by its appearance in the time domain and set of spec-tral components in the frequency domain. The team assumed each pulse represents a phoneme or a word of the animal’s spoken language.

When they analyze the various pulses registered in the reserve’s experiments, it showed the dolphins took turns producing sentence, and Yana and Yasha did not interrupt each other. The researchers believe the two listened to each other ’s pulses before producing its own pulses.

(Source: ibtimes.com)

The joint meeting of part makers affiliated with Iran Khodro and the French car manufacture, Peugeot, was held in the Iranian capital, Tehran.

The meeting, attended by senior managers from two sides, was aimed at exploring new opportunities for enhancing cooperation within a supply chain to produce a joint vehicle of IKCO and Peugeot.

More than 130 delegates from 65 French auto part supplier as well as 16 senior managers from the French car manufacturer – PSA - took part in the meeting. Meanwhile, over 140 delegates from Iranian parts makers were invited by Supplying Automotive Parts

Company of IKCO – SAPCO - to attend the meeting and hold bilateral or multilateral talks with their French counterparts.

During the first day of the meeting, a number of senior managers delivered speeches including SAP-CO CEO, Hossein Najjari, IKAP CEO, Mohammad Reza Motamed, Peugeot Executive Vice President in Africa and Middle East, Jean Christophe Quemard and Vice President of Peugeot’s operational projects in Iran, Jean Philippe Jombart.

The second day of the meeting will bring togeth-er the two sides’ active companies in the joint supply

chain. It will also be followed by the visit of the French delegates to some Iranian part makers' production lines.

The main goals of the two-day meeting include: Speeding up the process of gaining self-sufficiency in producing parts for new vehicles, establishing a mutual interaction between two sides' part makers to promote parts' quality, improving local part makers' engineering capabilities and competency, developing the required export capacity in Iran auto and part making indus-try and preparing the ground for clinching other new deals of joint cooperation.

IKCO, Peugeot Part Makers to Cooperate in Joint Supply Chain

Physicists at the U.S. Department of Ener-gy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Lab-oratory (PPPL) have successfully tested a new device that will lead to a better un-derstanding of the interactions between ultrahot plasma contained within fusion facilities and the materials inside those facilities. The measurement tool, known as the Materials Analysis Particle Probe (MAPP), was built by a consortium that includes Princeton University and the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Cham-paign (U. of I.).

The device lets scientists test the chemical make-up of the surface of ma-terials exposed to plasma, while keeping the materials in a vacuum. The research was published in the July issue of Review of Scientific Instruments, and was funded by the DOE Office of Science (Fusion En-ergy Sciences) and the Francisco José de Caldas Fellowship Program.

MAPP's leading developer is Professor Jean Paul Allain, now at the U. of I., who began the project in 2011. Collaborators at PPPL include physicists Robert Kaita, Charles Skinner, and Bruce Koel.

"Using MAPP, we are seeing for the first time the evolution of the materials when they interact with the plasma, and how the conditioning and other procedures modify the chemistry of the materials," said lead author Felipe Bedoya, a gradu-

ate student in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma and Radiological Engineering at the U. of I. Bedoya spent a semester at PPPL investigating the relationship be-tween the conditioning of plasma-facing components (PFCs) and the behavior of plasma in the National Spherical Torus Experiment-Upgrade (NSTX-U), the na-tion's newest fusion device and the flag-ship fusion facility at PPPL.

(Source: EurekAlert)

Researchers successfully test device that analyzes components within a vacuum

W O M E Nd e s k

W O M E Nd e s k

RECIPE OF THE WEEK

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

W O M E N h t t p : / / w w w . t e h r a n t i m e s . c o m / w o m e nSEPTEMBER 13, 2016SEPTEMBER 13, 201612

IN FOCUS TEHRAN TIMES/ Shima Ahangari

“My mother is pure radiance. She is the sun I can touch and kiss and hold without getting burnt.” Sanober Khan

Some 2,000 nomad women pass literacy courses

TEHRAN — A number of 2,000 il-literate nomad women from prov-

inces of East Azarbaijan, Ardabil, Fars and Kohki-luyeh-Boyerahmad have passed literacy courses, the vice-president for women’s affairs said recently.

Speaking at a ceremony held in Tehran on the oc-casion of the International Literacy Day (September 8), Shahindokht Molaverdi noted that gender dis-crimination in education has been considerably re-duced and the national regulations put emphasis on literacy as a basic human rights issue.

A number of 400 teachers are trained for teaching the illiterate nomad women, she added.

In 1966 only 17.14 percent of nomad women in the country were literate, however the number in-creased to 80.1 percent in 2011, Molaverdi said, adding the government has made special efforts to administer educational justice.

According to Molaverdi, about two thirds of il-literate people in the world are women and that women make some 70 percent of poor people all over the world.

N E W SVictims of acid attacks honored in lead-up to London fashion weekTwo women who were badly scarred when they had acid thrown at them will be taking to the catwalk this week at a charity gala event in the lead-up to London fashion week.

Adele Bellis, 24, from Lowestoft in Suffolk, and Laxmi, 26, from Delhi, will be joining models on the catwalk for a show run by the British Asian Trust and a charity, GMSP,

which helps the victims of sexual violence.

Bellis had sulphuric acid dropped on her head in August 2014 while wait-ing at a bus stop in an at-tack orchestrated by her ex-boyfriend. The attack caused her to lose an ear and resulted in scarring to one side of her face. Bel-lis’s ex-boyfriend was sen-tenced to life in prison for the attack.

Laxmi, who is one of India’s most prominent an-ti-acid attack campaigners was the victim of an attack when she was 15 after she

rejected the advances of a 32-year-old man. She has spoken about how after the attack she was forced to stay indoors and was rejected by her family, while her at-tacker went unpunished and got married. She was a key voice in the campaign to regulate sales of acid in India.

The women, as well as about a dozen models, will be modelling designs by British Asian designer Raishma and shoe designer Lucy Choi and as they walk will be holding signs saying “resilience”, “respect” and “honor”. The aim, says Sonal Sachdev Patel, CEO of GMSP, is to remind people about the global problem of violence against women and to honor the women who survive it.

“You see acid survivors and you see how unfair it is, you see how one act of violence has a huge impact on a woman’s life. But a lot of violence isn’t visible, the story is much wider,” said Patel.

“We feel so much admiration for Laxmi and Adele. I met with a surgeon who does a lot of work with acid survivors, he said most of these people don’t want to leave the house and so for one to step out on to a cat-walk with all those lights, that’s a huge thing that requires such strength of character. They are standing up for all women who face violence, some of whom aren’t willing to stand up yet.”

(Source: The Guardian)

Peach wrinkle“Delicious with fresh peaches. This recipe has been made for several generations in our family. A favorite for summer. Can also be made with other fruits, but peaches have always been the best!”

Ingredients:6 fresh peaches - peeled,

pitted, and sliced 1/2 cup white sugar 1/4 cup butter, softened 1 cup white sugar 2 eggs 1/2 cup milk 1 1/2 cups all-purpose

flour 4 teaspoons baking pow-

der 1/4 teaspoon salt

Directions:Preheat oven to 325 de-

grees F (165 degrees C). Grease a baking dish.

Mix peaches with 1/2 cup sugar in a bowl. Arrange in the bottom of the prepared baking dish.

Beat butter and 1 cup sugar together in a bowl un-til creamy. Add eggs and milk; stir to combine. Mix flour, baking powder, and salt together in a separate bowl; add to butter mixture. Stir until fully incorporated. Pour batter evenly over peaches.

Bake in the preheated oven until center is set and bounces back when lightly pressed, 40 to 45 minutes.

An American woman attacked two Muslim women and their babies in New York, trying to rip off their hijabs and pushing over their strollers, which the prosecutors have described as a hate crime.

The attacker, whose real name is Emirjeta Xhelili, ap-proached the women in a Brooklyn street on Thursday afternoon and tried to rip the hijabs off their heads, then hit the women in the face, pushing over one stroller and rattling another, CNN reported. The two babies were 11-months and 15-months-old, the prosecutors said.

The 32-year-old attacker then yelled “Get the the f...k out of America, b….s! This is America — you shouldn’t be different from us.”

Prosecutors said she also tried to knock over a stroll-

er carrying one of the babies.The mothers and babies were not seriously hurt in

the incident. Xhelili continued to verbally abuse the women as police took her into custody.

She is currently facing charges of assault, reckless en-dangerment of a child and harassment.

Xhelili has no previous convictions but has alleged-ly been posting hate-filled Islamophobic messages on Facebook under the name Mary Magdalene.

She posted a racist message about “aliens with black skins” and in another she wrote: “You’re lucky for a time that is left, for I have counted your days!”

Meanwhile, in a post written a day earlier she ap-peared to threaten Muslim women wearing veils.

“From this moment on, every woman that waers (sic) the jihab/hijab will go to hell!” she wrote.

Her messages also included praise for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

“Can’t hide I love Trump. When I had no hope and I thought everyone was bad, I looked at Trump’s good-ness and speeches (sic) ... And I had hope.”

The Council on Islamic Relations released a statement imploring the DA to treat the incident seriously, while encouraging local mosques and Islamic institutions to increase security, stating that the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks may be used as “an excuse to attack American Muslims.”

(Source: Daily Sabah)

A 29-year-old woman has been charged over a failed jihadist attack near Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral as French pol-iticians continue to argue about how to deal with the country’s severe terror threat.

The woman, named as Ornella G, was linked to a women’s terror “commando” that the Paris prosecutor said was guid-ed by Islamic State from Syria. Several women have been arrested in France in recent days as police believed a cell was about to attack Paris’s Gare de Lyon sta-tion, days after trying to blow up a car near Notre Dame.

The commando – including a 23-year-old woman who had been engaged at different times to two French extremists who carried out attacks this summer – il-lustrated how extensive new terror cells have been able to form in France since

the November attacks that killed 130 in Paris last year. A 15-year-old boy was also arrested and questioned at the weekend over links to the failed plot.

The boy had been under house arrest since France declared a state of emer-gency after the Paris attacks, two judicial sources said on condition of anonymi-ty. They did not say why he was under house arrest. His arrest on Saturday came as he was planning an attack in a public place in the French capital, one of the sources said.

The prime minister, Manuel Valls, said on Sunday that the current terror threat in France was at “maximum” and that at least two terror attacks had been thwart-ed in the past week.

In a country that has seen more than 230 people die in terrorist attacks since January 2015, Valls said: “There will be

more attacks. There will be innocent victims. Each time I say those words, because it’s my role, I realize the impor-tance and gravity of it.”

He said 700 French jihadis were cur-rently fighting with ISIL in Syria, including more than 200 women. French secu-rity services were also watching 15,000 people for radicalization. He rejected repeated calls by the rightwing former president Nicolas Sarkozy for a type of internment in which people suspected of showing signs of radicalization would be put in special detention centers.

Valls said Sarkozy was wrong to try to “strangle the state of law”. Despite a se-rious overcrowding problem already fac-ing French prisons, Valls said that 10,000 new prison places had to be created in the next 10 years for isolation cells and dedicated units for radicalized prisoners.

Ornella G’s fingerprints were found in a Peugeot 607 car that was abandoned last Sunday a few hundred meters from Notre Dame in an area thronging with tourists. The car contained five gas cyl-inders, three bottles of diesel and a lit cigarette. Two women are suspected of attempting to blow up the car before fleeing when they saw a man they be-lieved to be a plainclothes police officer.

Ornella G, who has three children, had been previously known to authorities for wanting to go to Syria to join jihadis. Her lawyer told French media that she had confessed to investigators. The French paper Le Journal du Dimanche reported that she had told investigators that she and another woman had driven around Paris in the early hours of last Sunday morning, initially considering blowing up the car near the Eiffel Tower.

She has been charged with associa-tion with a terrorist group and attempted murder by an organized group. She was arrested at a service station in southern France as she attempted to flee south with her children and former partner.

Ines Madani, 19, who is also sus-pected of taking part in the failed Notre Dame attack, continued to be ques-tioned on Sunday. She was arrested on Thursday in a town south-east of Paris with two other women as they prepared to carry out what officials called another “imminent attack” on a railway station, probably Paris’s Gare de Lyon. In her handbag, she had a written statement of allegiance to ISIL.

Another of the women arrested, referred to as Sarah H, aged 23, had been engaged at different times to two French extremists who carried out dead-ly attacks earlier this year. One of them was Larossi Abballa, who murdered a police commander and his police officer partner in June at their home in Mag-nanville outside Paris in the presence of their three-year-old son. He filmed the aftermath on Facebook Live before dy-ing in a police raid. The other was Adel Kermiche, who slit the throat of an el-derly French priest during morning mass in Normandy in July.

(Source: The Guardian)

New York woman tries to rip off Muslim women’s hijabs, attacks babies in apparent hate crime

Woman charged over failed terror attack on Notre Dame in Paris

TEHRAN — The eighth congress on Women and the Sacred Defense will

be held here on September 26.The event is aimed at honoring female authors and

publishers who work on voicing unstated facts about the Iraqi war against Iran in 1980s, which is referred to in Iran as Sacred Defense, and identifying the role of women in

the national economy during the years of imposed war, IRNA reported on Sunday.

Outstanding women in cultural, literary, and social works are to be honored at the congress, the report added.

The Sacred Defense Week is commemorated every year in Iran from September 21-28.

8th congress on Women and Sacred Defense to be held

Female farmers of The Chardangeh region in Mazandaran Province harvesting rice in traditional way without using any modern machinery.

Laxmi, 26, an acid attack survi-vor from Delhi in India, doing a yoga class.

TEHRAN TIMESIran’s Leading International Daily

Advertising Dept021 - 430 51 450Tel:

WORLD IN FOCUSh t t p : / / w w w . t e h r a n t i m e s . c o m / i n t e r n a t i o n a l 13I N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L Y

J U M P

At least 48 people have been wounded in Turkey in a car bomb explosion tar-geting the provincial offices of the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi/AKP) in the country’s eastern city of Van.

The explosion struck the AK Party building in a central district in Van on Monday. It took place in the heart of the bustling city, between the ruling AKP’s of-fices and those of the governor.

A Turkish official said 48 people in-cluding two police officers were wound-ed, two critically.

It was not immediately clear who was behind the blast that took place on the first day of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha (the Feast of Sacrifice).

Turkey’s southeast has been witness-ing several bombings and other at-tacks since last year, when the militant

Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK/Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê) withdrew from a ceasefire agreement with the Turkish government.

On Saturday, Turkish officials said they had thwarted an assassination attempt against the deputy chairman of the ruling AK party, Mehdi Eker.

There were no immediate official re-ports on who or what group may have been behind the plot. However, Turkish media accused the PKK of planning the attack.

Ankara has been engaged in a large-scale anti-PKK campaign in its southern border region over the past few months. The Turkish military has also been pounding Kurdish militant positions in northern Iraq and Syria as well.

(Source: AP)

Hillary Clinton diagnosed with pneumoniaHillary Clinton has been diagnosed with pneumonia, her per-sonal doctor announced, after the United States Democratic presidential candidate fell ill at a 9/11 memorial.

The episode has renewed focus on her health less than two months before an election.

She was diagnosed on Friday, the doctor said, but her condition was not made public until Sunday afternoon. Hours earlier, a video was posted on social media, apparently showing Clinton stumbling and her knees buckling, before being helped by aides into a black van leaving the site of the September 11, 2001 attack in New York.

She was taken to her daughter Chelsea's home in the city and appeared on her own about two hours later, wearing sunglasses and telling reporters that she was “feeling great.”

The temperature in New York was about 27 degrees Cel-sius, combined with high humidity.

Clinton wore a high-collared shirt and a dark suit during the memorial honoring the nearly 3,000 people killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Democratic Congressman Joe Crowley told reporters that it was “stiflingly hot”, and he himself had to leave the ceremony.

Clinton's doctor, Lisa Bardack, said in a statement that the veter-an politician has been experiencing a cough related to allergies and that an examination on Friday showed it was pneumonia.

“She was put on antibiotics and advised to rest and mod-ify her schedule. While at this morning's event, she became overheated and dehydrated. I have just examined her and she is now re-hydrated and recovering nicely,” Bardack said.

Clinton cancelled her campaign trip to California on Mon-day because of her diagnosis of pneumonia.

Clinton's speech at a campaign rally on Labor Day in Cleveland was interrupted by a coughing spell. During the speech, she quipped, “Every time I think about Trump I get allergic.” She then resumed her speech.

Republican rival Donald Trump and his supporters have been hinting at potential health issues for months, ques-tioning Clinton's stamina when she takes routine days off the campaign trail and reviving questions about a concussion she sustained in December 2012 after fainting. Her doctor attrib-uted that episode to a stomach virus and dehydration.

Clinton's doctor reported that she is fully recovered from the concussion, which led to temporary double vision and discovery of a blood clot in a vein in the space between her brain and skull.

Clinton also has experienced deep vein thrombosis, a clot usually in the leg, and takes the blood thinner Coumadin to prevent new clots.

Trump attended the same event marking the 15th anni-versary of the 9/11 attacks. Asked by a reporter about Clin-ton's health incident, Trump said: “I don't know anything.”

Past presidential candidates have released much more de-tailed information about their health than either Trump, 70, or Clinton, 68.

For example, John McCain, the failed 2008 Republican presi-dential nominee, allowed reporters to see 1,173 pages of med-ical records after concerns were raised about a cancer scare.

In a letter released by her doctor in July 2015, Clinton was described as being in “excellent health” and “fit to serve” in the White House. It noted that her current medical conditions include hyperthyroidism and seasonal pollen allergies.

Trump has also been under pressure to release detailed information on his health and medical history.

Instead, in December, Trump's doctor wrote in a short let-ter that was made public that his blood pressure and labora-tory results “were astonishingly excellent” and that he would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency”.

(Source: agencies)

Explosion hits Turkish town of Van, wounding 48

Yemeni army soldiers and allied volunteer fighters have taken control of a military base in Saudi Arabia’s southwestern region of Asir in a retaliatory operation against Riyadh.

The media bureau of the operations command in Yemen released footage on Sunday evening show-ing Yemeni troopers and allied forces firing a barrage of mortar shells and artillery rounds at the Hanjar base in the Qulal Shaibani area of the Saudi region before moving on to seize it.

Saudi soldiers at the site can be seen running for their lives.The allied Yemeni forces have recently managed to

move into Saudi territory in an effort to pressure the Saudi invaders to withdraw from Yemen.

New airstrikeMeanwhile, the House of Saud regime fighter jets

have pounded several areas across Yemen on the first day of the Muslim holidays of Eid al-Adha (the Feast of Sacrifice), killing at least seven people in the northern province of Sa’ada.

Saudi airstrikes killed at least 12 civilians and injured 10 others in the area of al-Mahazer in the Sahar district of Sa’ada on Monday, Yemen’s al-Masirah news website reported.

According to the report, the Saudi jets conducted seven air raids in the area.

Two other people were killed as Saudi jets pounded the district of Baqem in the same province. The aerial

attacks also left one person injured.Warplanes also bombed the district of Bakil Al Mir

in the northwestern Yemeni province of Hajjah and the district of Kahbob in Ta’izz Province in southern Yemen.

Several areas in the district of Bani al-Hareth, north of the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, were also targeted by Saudi jets.

However, there were no immediate reports on pos-sible casualties and the extent of damage caused in the latter air raids. The House of Saud regime has been in-cessantly pounding Yemen since March 2015, with the United Nations putting the death toll from the military aggression at about 10,000. The offensive was launched to reinstate Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, a Saudi ally who has resigned as Yemen’s president.

UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Yemen Jamie Mc-Goldrick said last month that the death toll from the Sau-di military aggression could rise even further as some areas had no medical facilities, and that people were often buried without any official record being made.

(Source: agencies)

Yemeni forces seize control of Saudi baseSaudi jets kill 14 more Yemenis

Why would the EU appease the deluded Brexiters?

6 Boris Johnson says we are a great country. Not an-ymore. What greatness we possessed came from our allianc-es. By voting to leave we have ignored the advice of every friend we had in the world. Now we are asking the countries we spurned to help us and they are finding reasons to look away.

The right says the EU will want to give us a better deal out than we had in because the EU nations will still want their exporters to sell to us. They don’t look at how politically im-possible it would be for Europe’s leaders to tear up EU rules when they are having to face down their own xenophobes and Europhobes.

They don’t have a shred of evidence that the EU will ap-pease us. Just a forlorn hope and an echo of voices from the time of the British appeasers. They were as convinced that they were dealing with “hard-headed, hard-boiled poli-ticians”, who would do whatever Britain wanted and not “risk everything over some hasty action”. They were as befuddled.

(Source: The Guardian)

SEPTEMBER 13, 2016

‘Saudis Hajj restrictions reminiscent of Israel policy on Aqsa Mosque’

CIA chief warns of Russia’s sophisticated hacking capabilitiesThe United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan warns that the U.S. must be on guard in the face of Russia’s “exceptionally capa-ble and sophisticated” cyber capabilities.

“I think that we have to be very, very wary of what the Russians might be trying to do in terms of collecting information in that cyber realm as well as what they might want to do with it,” Brennan said on Sunday on CBS's Face the Nation.

The CIA chief refused to give a clear answer when asked whether Russia was trying to influence the U.S. presidential election.

However, he added that the FBI (Fed-eral Bureau of Investigation) was inves-tigating the recent hack of Democratic National Committee emails.

“We've known this for quite a while. Their intelligence services are quite active around the world,” Bren-nan said.

“And this is something that we have to make sure that we're on guard for, not just for our national security purposes, but also for making sure that our system of government here is going to be pre-served,” he added.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has been tasked with investi-gating what officials have described as a “broad covert operation” by Russia to disrupt the November election in the U.S.

“The Russians hack our systems all the time, not just government but also corpo-rate and personal systems,” Clapper said earlier this month at an intelligence and security summit in Washington.

However, the FBI and other coun-ter-intelligence agencies involved in the probe of the DNC hacking have not yet officially attributed the cyber-attack to Russian government hackers.

The disclosures, which included a number of embarrassing internal emails, forced DNC Chairwoman Debbie Was-serman Schultz to step down.

The campaign of Democratic pres-idential nominee Hillary Clinton has blamed Russia for the cyber intrusion, saying the publication of the stolen emails was aimed at helping Republican nomi-nee Donald Trump win the election.

The Kremlin has rejected the hacking accusations, saying it would work with any U.S. administration if they wanted to.

(Source: Press TV)

The leader of Yemen’s Ansarullah move-ment has lashed out at the House of Saud regime for mishandling of the Hajj rituals, saying restrictions imposed on Muslims for this year’s Hajj are reminis-cent of Israel’s repeated desecration of the al-Aqsa Mosque.

In his message to the Yemenis on the occasion of the Eid al-Adha (the Feast of Sacrifice) which fell on Mon-day this year, Abdulmalek Badred-din al-Houthi said Saudi Arabia has deprived a large number of Muslims from this year ’s Hajj due to political reasons like the way many Palestin-ians are being barred from entering the Al-Aqsa Mosque in the occupied East al-Quds (Jerusalem).

He said Saudi rulers have no right to claim full control over Ka'aba and the Grand Mosque in Mecca and block the access of pilgrims to the places, adding that there is no justification for the kingdom’s move to prevent Muslims from performing the religious duty of Hajj.

The comments came after this year’s Hajj pilgrimage began in Saudi Arabia on Saturday without the presence of pil-

grims from Iran.Elsewhere, in his message, the An-

sarullah leader once again slammed Saudi Arabia’s air campaign against Yemen, saying the regime in Riyadh insists on continuing the aggression in order to appease the United States and Israel.

The Ansarullah leader said Saudis have committed the most heinous crimes against the Yemeni nation in more than 18 months of their ag-gression. He, however, said the mil-itary aggression has not deterred the Yemenis from continuing their resistance against the war on their country.

More than 10,000 people have been killed since Riyadh launched its airstrikes against Yemen in March last year, according to the United Nations.

The air campaign, which later ex-panded to include ground operations across Yemen, is meant to restore pow-er to resigned president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, who currently resides in Saudi Arabia.

(Source: Press TV)

1 Finally, European banks are afraid of campaigns of “name and shame” in the United States if they devel-op relations with Iran. But I am confident that channels will be found with time to go around most of these obstacles.

Why is Europe hesitant to enter serious cooperation with Iran?

A: The Europeans certainly want to cooperate with Iran, as was shown by the numerous delegations of businessmen who have visited Iran and the important amount of agreements which have been signed. Current trade is already devel-oping, but important projects take time to take shape. On the Iranian side, also there have been delays; for instance for the adoption of the new model of Iranian Petroleum Contract, and till then nothing

could start in this field. Why is the U.S. terrorizing Euro-

pean banks not to revive business ties with Iran?

A: Frankly, I believe that Obama and Kerry are sincere when they say that they support the development of trade be-tween Iran and Europe, but, as you know, there are still strong resistance from the

U.S. political establishment, the neo-conservatives, the Republicans, and all the people in the public and the private sector who wish to see the failure of the JCPOA.

Is the JCPOA in danger?A: Yes, indeed. It is a very fragile agree-

ment, which needs good faith and posi-tive spirit on both sides, going beyond its sheer letter, to succeed in the long run. But what will happen after Obama? What will happen after Rouhani, if he is not ree-lected next spring? This gives reasons to worry.

The Iranians are rather getting disappointed as the nuclear deal has failed to open up channels for trade and investment, and the hardliners are using this situation as an opportunity for political gains. How do you assess this?

A: Even with the best good will on all sides, one could not hope that things would change at full speed after the entry into force of the agreement. I understand very well all the reasons that the Iranians had to be impatient, but you illusioned yourselves when you thought that open-ing and prosperity would come back in a few weeks or months. It is only in two or three years than people will be able to feel fully the benefits of the agreement… if the agreement is still alive!

What is your prediction of the JCPOA?

The JCPOA should clearly be seen by all parties as a precious common good to be protected by all means, but, sadly, it

is not the case today. There are powerful opponents in the United States, but also in Iran, and Europe is caught in between, without the capacity to counter these op-positions.

Aren’t the oppositions or doubts over the sale of Airbus and Boeing passenger planes to Iran a violation of the JCPOA? And how do you see the future of the Airbus deal with Iran?

A: Again, these are heavy and com-plex decisions which take some time to take shape. But I am optimistic about the return of Airbus and Boeing in Iran. The U.S. administration has to give its agree-ment to the sales, under a few conditions, as a denial would be a clear violation of the letter and spirit of the JCPOA.

How do you analyze the cooper-ation between Iran and Europe in the energy sector?

A: On this point too, I am confident that cooperation will develop and blos-som as never before…There is a real need in Iran and European companies are ea-ger to play a major positive role in your country. You have “to give time to time” as former French President François Mit-terrand used to say…

What would be the consequenc-es if the JCPOA is not implemented?

It would be, of course, a major disaster for everybody: for Europe, for the United States, for Iran, for the whole Middle East, with the return of tension, economic de-pression, risks of war…. Let us hope that these perspectives will stop short the op-ponents of the agreement from reckless

behavior. Is Europe willing to cooperate

with Iran to combat terrorism?A: In principle, yes, of course. But the

difficulty is to agree precisely on who is a terrorist and who is not. As you know the Middle East is at the moment a re-gion where the friend of your friend is not necessarily your friend, the enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend either, the friend of your enemy could very well be your friend, and the enemy of your friend could also be your friend…

How do you see the future of re-lations between Iran and Europe?

A: There has always been a deep and close relationship between Iran and Europe, not always easy, but made of mutual respect, admiration

and understanding. Frankly, I believe that, all in all, in spite of all the past crises, the Europeans remain the best and closest friends of Iran in the whole world. Our task today is to build on this basis to reach new heights… here, the sky is the limit!

France’s ex-ambassador: Major disaster if JCPOA is violated

“Frankly, I believe that, all in all, in spite of all the past crises,

the Europeans remain the best and closest friends of Iran in the

whole world.”

“There are still strong resistance from the U.S. political

establishment, the neoconservatives, the Republicans, … who

wish to see the failure of the JCPOA.”

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

W O R L D S P O R T h t t p : / / w w w . t e h r a n t i m e s . c o m / w o r l d s p o r tSEPTEMBER 13, 2016SEPTEMBER 13, 201614

Real Madrid’s Cristiano Ronaldo on Sporting matchCristiano Ronaldo has never failed to score against a former club in Europe and spoke to UEFA.com about “a special match” – when Real Madrid take on Sporting CP on Wednesday.

The all-time leading scorer in UEFA competition, Cristiano Ron-aldo does not need much encouragement to get goals in Europe.

But being drawn against a former club in the UEFA Champi-ons League seems to particularly inspire him. In 2007/08, when Manchester United were placed in a group with Ronaldo’s first

team Sporting CP, the Portugal forward scored in the eventual champions’ 1-0 and 2-1 wins – rifling in an added-time free-kick in the second leg at Old Trafford.

Then in 2012/13, Ronaldo’s new employers Real Madrid took on United in the round of 16, and Ronaldo struck in each leg of a 3-2 aggregate success.

The triangle is now com-plete as, on Wednesday, Ma-drid launch their title defence at home to Sporting. We spoke to the recently-crowned UEFA Best

Player in Europe about his latest reunion and Madrid’s attempt to become the first club to win two straight UEFA Champions Leagues.

Ronaldo on playing Sporting CP ...It’s a special match, it’s a special team. I wanted to draw Sporting

again, because I think they have a good team, they have a good coach, and it will be another special moment in my life.

I’ve played against Sporting before in the Champions League, against Benfica too, and against Porto. To play Sport-ing again is a privilege for me.

Ronaldo on Borussia Dortmund and Legia Warszawa ...They’re always difficult teams. We’ve played Borussia Dort-

mund in this competition before – and lost. We know they’re a very difficult team, especially at their place as they’ve got fantastic fans.

I’ve never played [at Legia], and to be honest I don’t know much about their team, so it will be a new experience, a nice experience against a team I’ve never played against. But I hope there won’t be any surprises and that we can win both matches.

Ronaldo on defending the trophy ...It’s a challenge, it’s a great challenge, and I think at Real Ma-

drid we have a chance to win it again. We know it’s a very dif-ficult competition, but nothing is easy so we’ll try. We’ll take it match by match, and first think about the group stage, as in my opinion it’s a strong group. We’ll see how the competition un-folds. But think positive – that it’s possible to win it again.

On winning European titles with Madrid and Portugal in 2016 ...In terms of trophies it was possibly the best year of my career. Af-

ter winning the Champions League, winning the European Cham-pionship with my country capped an extraordinary year for me.

Trophy-wise it was the best, I’ve never had a better year. The same goes both collectively and individually, because I was top scorer in the Champions League and had a good European Championship, and we were able to win the two biggest tro-phies. So it really was a top drawer, excellent season for me.

(Source: UEFA)

Man United become first UK club to earn over half a billion pounds in a yearManchester United have announced total revenue of £515.3 mil-lion ($683.5m) for the year ending June 30, 2016.

United have taken a record profit of £68m and in the process have become the first UK club to earn over half a billion pounds in a single year. However, that figure is short of the £570m in annual revenue that Barcelona announced in July.

United are also on target for record revenues again over the next year, despite failing to qualify for the Champions League, having been helped by the huge rise in broadcasting income for this season.

Following the news, executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward set his sights on returning United to “the pinnacle of our sport.”

Speaking in his conference call on Monday, he said: “Jose Mourinho’s appointment is a reflection of our determination to return to the pinnacle of our sport. We are writing the next chapter in our history.”

Looking ahead, Woodward highlighted the effect world re-cord signing Paul Pogba has already had, saying that the impact on Facebook was “more than Bale and Neymar combined.”

Their £515m figure for 2015-16 was short of Barcelona’s, revealed in July, as the Spanish club announced earnings of £570m, having benefited from a stronger Euro against the pound post-Brexit.

United, who agreed a 10-year £750m ($1.28 billion) con-tract with adidas -- the biggest deal in sports-licensing history -- in 2014, have a net debt that is £260.9m, but commercial revenue has soared to £268.3m, which is an increase of 36.3 percent over the prior year.

The accounts showed that sacking Louis van Gaal and his coaching staff cost £8.4m in compensation.

United’s wage bill was up to £232.2m, with there being a rise in player salaries due to Champions League participation.

They also had to write off £6.7m as an asset because Bas-tian Schweinsteiger is “no longer considered to be a member of the first-team squad.”

In a season when they won the FA Cup, United also saw matchday and TV revenue rise and signed 14 sponsorship deals.

Woodward had previously been reported as saying: “Our record Fiscal 2016 financial performance reflects the continued underlying strength of the business and the club is on target to achieve record revenues in 2017, even without a contribution from the Champions League.”

“This strong financial performance has enabled us to invest in our squad, team management and facilities to position us to challenge for, and win, trophies in the coming years.”

(Source: ESPN)

F O O T B A L L Stan Wawrinka beats Novak Djokovic in four sets to take first US Open title

Kevin De Bruyne believes Pep Guardiola’s arrival has offered Manchester City a “new beginning” and led to their flying start in the Premier League.

The Belgium playmaker opened the scoring in Sat-urday’s 2-1 Manchester derby win over United at Old Trafford, which saw City maintain their perfect start to the Premier League campaign.

De Bruyne, who enjoyed a fine first season at the Eti-had Stadium in 2015-16, feels the impact of Guardiola has given his team a lift.

“I think the way we try to play now is very enjoyable, especially for the attacking players, because we try to play nice football, the way we want to play,” he said.

“I think maybe for some guys it’s a new beginning. We have got to go a little bit away from the physical game in the Premier League, because we are not as strong as other teams.

“We know that, so we try to dominate them with the way we want to play.”

De Bruyne has a goal and two assists in the league this season and is enjoying his role under Guardiola.

The 25-year-old urged his team-mates to keep pro-ducing, having been impressed by their ability to adapt to the Spanish manager.

“Football isn’t easy,” De Bruyne said.“Obviously everybody has his own style and you

need to adapt to it, but I think everyone is working re-ally hard - even the guys coming in, they do it perfectly.

“At the moment it is very positive, so we just have to try to keep it in this flow.”

City face Borussia Monchengladbach in the Cham-pions League on Tuesday before hosting Bournemouth four days later.

(Source: Goal)

After treading a gilded path to his seventh US Open final, Novak Djokovic stumbled, literally, in sight of the prize as Stan Waw-rinka found the strength and conviction to beat the world No1 in four pulsating sets – the last of them wreathed in controversy – on a warm September night.

Patrick McEnroe, commentating in the ESPN box, shared the cynical displeasure of most onlookers when the defending champion, who appeared to be cramping, was granted a dubious medical timeout to have his toes tended to midway through the fourth set, shortly after being broken.

It appeared to be a risible manipulation of the regulations, which say timeouts can only be taken for an “acute medical con-dition that requires immediate attention”. Wawrinka did not seem impressed, seeking assurance from the tournament referee, Brian Earley, that all was above board – and shooting his opponent a knowing glance.

“Sorry, man,” Djokovic said to Waw-rinka. For what, one wondered? They had been playing for three hours and 23 minutes, by a distance Djokovic’s longest match of the tournament.

“That was another example of a com-plete abuse of the rules,” said McEnroe. “It’s up to the officials to do something about it, and they just don’t have the guts to do it.”

Otherwise, the final was a minor clas-sic. Wawrinka won his third major 6-7, 6-4, 7-5, 6-3 in just under four hours, with several passages of glorious tennis from both players.

“I don’t know what’s happening right now. Novak, you’re a great champion,” Wawrinka said after the match. “We know each other since many, many years. I had the chance to practise with him and play him in big matches. This is amazing. I came here not expecting to win it, but I was trying to win every match. I am com-pletely empty. I had to bring everything today.”

Djokovic paid tribute to his opponent after the match. “I cannot tell you that [about their exchange at the net]. It was a friendly chat. Congratulations Stan. You were the more courageous player in the decisive moment and you deserved to win this title. He was the better play-er, tougher mentally. It was a fantastic couple of weeks for me. I didn’t know if I should come a few weeks before be-cause I suffered physically.”

In the last 50 men’s slams, only the Ar-gentinian Juan Martín del Potro here in the 2009 final, has broken the hegemony of the old world, as George Bush Jr used to call it – and, in another all-European final, Switzerland prevailed over Serbia. It was Wawrinka’s first US Open, to go with titles in Melbourne and Paris, and his fifth victory in 23 matches against the world No1. Un-der the circumstances, it might have been the most satisfying.

When Wawrinka beat Djokovic to win the French Open last year, he trusted his strong right arm, the one tattooed with Beckett’s famous “fail better” quote. It did not click immediately there or here – but nor did it fail him when it mattered. After dropping the first set, he not only avoided embarrassment, he crushed the Serb to win. It was an extraordinary fightback.

The heatwave finally broke, the lightest of zephyrs soothing the finalists’ brows in ideal conditions, with the roof open and the court playing a little more quickly than in the humid conditions that had prevailed for much of the tournament.

As at Roland Garros, Wawrinka started nervously, spraying shots everywhere, and Djokovic hit an ominous rhythm to go 3-0 up in under 10 minutes. But Wawrinka kept faith in his ground strokes, almost disre-garding the circumstances. Where Gaël

Monfils had tried to rope-a-dope Djokovic in the semi-finals, Wawrinka was still going for the knockout.

The champion inexplicably dropped his guard. A 134mph serve earned Waw-rinka a tie-break after he had played much of the set on his heels, but Djokovic played some sublime shots to take the set in his ninth shootout win over Wawrinka in 10 such contests, this time giving up just a single point.

He moved to the second set comfort-able in the knowledge that he was 51-0 at this tournament after winning the first set. Yet there was something in the still, early evening air to suggest drama.

As he did in Paris, Wawrinka drew that single-handed backhand from its scabbard and painted the deuce corner on his way to saving three break points for 3-1 up just under the hour. Djokovic prowled the baseline, breathing hard and looking as if he was enduring some sort of private hell. Perhaps he was. Tennis at this level is no picnic.

The Swiss, whose serve has been such a weapon here, hit his fourth double fault, and was hanging on at 4-1.

Djokovic broke back but gestured an-grily towards Boris Becker and his team as Wawrinka held to love for 5-4. A blistering forehand down the line earned Wawrinka two set points in the 10th game. Djokovic saved one of them to win a tense rally with a deft volley, but he shoved a forehand wide and they were a set apiece.

The world No1 smashed his racket to smithereens during the break. Who could blame him?

Wawrinka saved three break points to hold at the start of the third after nearly two hours of tennis.

At about this point in his semi-final against Monfils, Djokovic was almost out on his feet in the oppressive heat and humidity. Still, he had played only eight hours and 58 minutes getting to the final, through 13 completed sets, because three of his six matches were incomplete due to a walkover and two retirements; Wawrinka endured nearly twice that: 17 hours and 54 minutes through 23 sets.

Yet there was little between them in stamina and strength as each sought to

win another two sets, preferably in a row. When the world No3 broke in the second game of the third set, the odds swung sharply in his favour. Djokovic knew he was in trouble. Bundled out early at Wim-bledon when ambitions of a calendar slam were still alive, and hobbled since with in-juries to wrist, elbow and both shoulders, the proudest of champions would not lie down, though. He broke back and after two-and-a-half hours, they were level again, a set each and 3-3.

A quarter of an hour later, Djokovic held to love for the sixth time, to stay in the set, but his level dropped at 6-5 and a loose backhand gave Wawrinka set point. Djokovic sliced a backhand wide – and the noise level in the arena went rock-concert crazy.

All tournament, Djokovic has had to receive treatment for some complaint or other. At 30-30 on his serve in the second game of the fourth set, he doubled up in pain after belting a forehand from deep, clutching at his groin. Two points later, Wawrinka broke him for 2-0.

Wawrinka broke to love, but Djokovic did not immediately seek medical assis-tance before the fourth game, perhaps suspecting it was cramp that had cut him down – and that is not treatable, as it is considered a failure in condition. He was desperate and somehow fought through three deuce points to hold.

Then the trainer emerged, Djokovic took off his shoes and asked for a callus to be clipped from under the big toe of his left foot, as well as a quick manicure of the toes on his right foot.

Refreshed, Djokovic returned to the court, and was not moving like someone with tender feet. He grabbed his 16th and 17th break points – but could not reap a dividend. And there weren’t too many peo-ple in the arena who had much sympathy with him. At the 2-5 changeover, the trainer re-emerged to treat Djokovic’s feet again.

He held, somehow, again moving with freedom, and went up two points as Wawrinka served for the title and his girl-friend, Donna Veki?, could barely watch as he struggled to deuce. The Swiss won an epic rally to get to match point with a gentle dab, Djokovic sprawled on hands and knees at the back of the court – and

Wawrinka raised his arms in triumph as his opponent’s final shot drifted long.

Djokovic was defensive later in ex-plaining the timeouts. “Just the toenails were off and bleeding. Yeah, it was quite painful to move around. You know, I tried.” He added: “The toe just happened today. Some other injury that was, you know, very serious at the time. I really didn’t know whether or not I’m going to come, to be honest. Decided like eight, nine days before the start of the Open, just to try. To play finals, it’s quite amazing.”

Asked if he were cramping in the final set, he replied. “No.”

Did he think it was fair to take it before Wawrinka’s next serve? “I was allowed, so I took it.” Was he surprised? “Why would I be surprised if I was allowed?” Because, it was pointed out, the rules stipulate a time-out was reserved for “an acute medical condition”. He replied, “It was. I don’t want to talk about this and you guys think I’m finding excuses. It’s just not necessary. I was allowed, so I took it.”

Asked if the rules should be looked at, given the suspicion that some players are abusing them, he said, “We’ll talk about it, sure. If players bring that up to the table, you know. You know, I didn’t have any I guess major complaints about that against me or me against any other player. If there are ... if this is a debate and players think there should be something changed in the rules, of course we are there to discuss. Will bring this up to the council soon I guess if this is a big deal.”

What a fortnight it has been. It began with Phil Collins, of Chiswick and Miami, singing In the Air Tonight (rather well), an apt choice to mark the opening of the new roof, and culminated before play on Sunday with Norm Lewis’s rich baritone embracing the national anthem, after a moment of silence to mark the 15th anniversary of 9/11, as members of the US Marine 6th Communications Battal-ion, Brooklyn, drew the Stars and Stripes across the court.

They do have a sense of occasion in this noisy old town, and they were re-warded with a final that had pretty much everything.

(Source: Guardian)

De Bruyne: Man City very enjoyable under Guardiola

CHAMPIONS LEAGUE

S P O R Th t t p : / / w w w . t e h r a n t i m e s . c o m / s p o r t SEPTEMBER 11, SEPTEMBER 11, 20162016 15I N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L Y

Elitist Bayern Munich will not roll out red carpet for run-of-the-mill RostovIn the offices of the serial champions of Germany, in Sabener-strasse, Munich, you hear a soft purr of contentment. Bayern Munich may have said farewell this summer to the so-called “best coach in the world”, Pep Guardiola, but there are those who view his replacement, the most decorated, manager in the modern Uefa Champions League, Carlo Ancelotti, as perhaps an easier manager to deal with, day to day.

Bayern’s senior executives like the shape that Europe’s prin-cipal club tournament is taking, too. Bayern may not have lifted a European Cup for three years, but they have been in the last four for the past five editions.

They would like, at a minimum, to maintain those standards and never to be outside the elite. Their lead-ing executive, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, led the pres-sure group that eked out of Uefa the latest tranche of structural changes that will, from 2018, come even clos-er to guaranteeing that the competition guards the right of entry for the big clubs from the richer leagues.

Rummenigge did lit-tle for the cause of romance when he snorted, earlier this year that the likes of Bayern and Juventus should not be obliged to meet one another at the last-16 stage of the European Cup while “clubs like PSV, Genk and Wolfsburg are still there”. He demanded a stricter seeding mechanism. Rummenigge then successfully pressed for a future change to the Champions League that means that the four most glamorous domestic leagues in Europe – Spain, Germany, England and Italy – will from 2018 have a quartet of clubs each in the starting-grid, the group phase. In other words, four countries from a continent of more than 50 nations will get half of the 32 places in a mini-league system that captures the imagination of the world.

The group stage for this season begins Tuesday and Wednesday, with clubs from 16 countries playing their open-ing group fixtures.

Looking for an upset to the hierarchy? Munich’s Allianz Are-na is probably the worst place to start. Bayern host the kind of clash that Rummenigge’s protectionism finds a little tiresome. Rostov are the visitors, a Russian club with no pedigree at all in the European Cup except for their remarkable recent route though what the elite regard as an irritating cat-flap in the backdoor to the group stage.

Rostov finished a surprise second in last season’s Russian Premier League, ahead of the likes of Zenit Saint-Petersburg. That gave them a shot, albeit a long one, at keeping, via two knockout rounds, the company of the likes of Bayern, Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus. How long a shot? Meas-ured by the Uefa coefficient, the basis of European compe-tition seeding and a gauge designed to celebrate consistent performance among the elite, a very long shot indeed. Ros-tov’s coefficient is just over 11,000 points. Bayern’s is more than 163,000.

But Rostov have a formula that not only worked in Russia but abroad. They defeated Anderlecht of Belgium in the pre-quali-fying round, securing progress to the play-offs with a 2-0 win in Brussels. That brought them to a showdown with Ajax, four-time winners of the European Cup. After drawing in Amsterdam, they put four goals past the Dutch side in Russia. That is an extrava-gant result by Rostov’s standards, their success having been built on stout defending, marginal gains and the sharp finishing of Iranian striker Sardar Azmoun.

Bayern’s modus operandi is distinct. Two matches into the Bundesliga season, Bayern have scored eight goals and conced-ed none. Goliath has been flexing his muscles ahead of the visit of David, the rank Russian outsiders.

It looks a mismatch. Rostov have only ever played 10 games in European competitions; on Tuesday Ancelotti takes charge of his 149th Champions League fixture, 20 years, almost to the day, since he managed a club team for the first time in Europe.

Ancelotti, formerly of AC Milan, Real Madrid, Paris Saint-Ger-main and Chelsea, has what Rummenigge recognises as pure pedigree, and in a 2016/17 Champions League without either Milan club featuring, without Manchester United or Chelsea, pedigree is a quality the traditional heavyweights worry about, believes needs cultivating, protecting and favouring.

The likes of Rostov must seize their moment. They might not get another go for a while.

FIXTURES:Tuesday (all kick-off times are 10.45pm UAE)

Group A• Basel v Ludogorets Razgrad• Paris Saint-Germain v Arsenal

Group B• Benfica v Besiktas• Dynamo Kiev v Napoli

Group C• Barcelona v Celtic• Manchester City v Borussia Monchengladbach

Group D• Bayern Munich v Rostov• PSV Eindhoven v Atletico MadridWednesday

Group E• Bayer Leverkusen v CSKA Moscow• Tottenham Hotspur v Monaco

Group F• Legia Warsaw v Borussia Dortmund• Real Madrid v Sporting of Lisbon

Group G• Brugge v Leicester City• Porto v Copenhagen

Group H• Juventus v Sevilla• Lyon v Dynamo Zagreb

Iranian Paralympic archers win silver medals in RioIranian archers have picked up a silver medal at the 2016 Summer Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

46-year-old Iranian sportsman Ebrahim Ranjbarkivaj plus Paralym-pic and Olympic archer Zahra Ne’mati vied in the mixed team recurve open competitions at the Sambadrome Marques de Sapucaí parade area in Rio, and lost to the Chinese squad of Zhao Lixue and Wu Chun-yan 3-5 in the title showdown to claim the second spot.

The Italian contingent, consisting of Roberto Airoldi and Elis-abetta Mijno, edged past the Mongolian team 5-1 to settle for the bronze medal.

Ne’mati said after the final competition, “It was such a fine final, and I performed much better than the previous contests. We did not expect to receive the silver medal.”

The archery competitions at the 2016 Rio Paralympic Games start-ed on September 10, and will wrap up on September 17.

The Islamic Republic of Iran’s National Paralympic Committee has dispatched a 111-strong delegation, dubbed the Mina Caravan, to the 12-day sporting event. Iranian sportsmen and women are in action in 12 different fields.

Iranian athletes have so far clinched four medals — one gold and three silvers — putting the Islamic Republic in the 32nd slot of the medal count table.

China is on the top of the medal count table with 92 medals (39 golds, 30 silvers, 23 bronzes).

Great Britain is second with 56 medals (23 golds, 14 silvers, 19 bronzes), and Ukraine is third with a total of 49 medals (18 golds, 13 silvers and 18 bronzes).

The United States, Brazil, Uzbekistan, Australia, the Netherlands, Germany and Tunisia are in the 4th to 10th places respectively.

(Source: PressTV)

Iran’s Paralympic discus thrower Alireza Ghaleh Nasseri has won a silver medal at the athletics competitions of the 2016 Summer Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

On Saturday, the 25-year-old Iranian sportsman partic-ipated in the men’s discus throw F54/55/56 category com-petitions at the Estádio Olímpico João Havelange stadium in a Rio neighborhood, registering a throw of 44.04 meters to snatch the silver medal.

Brazilian-Spanish discus thrower Claudiney Batista dos Santos stood atop the podium with a winning throw of 45.33 meters.

The bronze went to Cuba’s Leonardo Diaz with a throw of 43.58 meters in his final attempt.

“This was my first appearance in an official international tournament, and I’m happy with my performance; even though I had managed to record a throw of 47.60 meters while training for the Paralympics,” Ghaleh Nasseri said after the contest.

He added, “It was a tough competition, with strong

contenders from Brazil and Cuba in attendance. I did not expect to earn a medal. I dedicate it to the Iranian nation.”

The athletics competitions at the 2016 Rio Paralym-

pic Games started on September 8, and will run through September 18.

The Islamic Republic of Iran’s National Paralympic Com-mittee has dispatched a 111-strong delegation, dubbed Mina Caravan, to the 12-day sporting event. Iranian sportsmen and women are in action in 12 different fields.

Iranian athletes have already taken home three medals - one gold and two silvers - putting the Islamic Republic in the 27th slot of the medal count table so far.

China is on the top of the medal count table with 69 (26 gold, 24 silver, 19 bronze).

Great Britain is second with 35 medals (15 gold, 8 silver, 12 bronze), and Ukraine is third with a total of 37 medals (12 gold, 10 silver and 15 bronze).

The United States, Brazil, the Netherlands, Germany, Uzbekistan, Tunisia and Mexico occupy the 4th to 10th places, respectively.

(Source: PressTV)

AFC President Shaikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa has extended his greetings on the occasion of Eid Al Adha.

“I have great pleasure in extending my greetings and good wishes to the football family of Asia on the auspicious occasion of Eid Al Adha,” said Shaikh Salman.

“May this festival lead to peace and prosperity,” he added.

Shaikh Salman added that Eid Al Adha is a time of joy and happiness.

“May this festival strengthen our sense of brotherhood and goodwill towards all. Let us dedicate ourselves on this day to the service of humanity.”

(Source: AFC)

Iran’s Ghaleh Nasseri collects silver in Rio 2016 Paralympics

AFC President wishes a joyous and blessed Eid Al Adha

Iran Football 5-a-side beat Moroc-co 2-0 in Pool A of the Paralympic Games.

In the match held at the Rio de Janeiro’s Centro Olimpico de Tenis, Hossein Rajabpour and Behzad Za-daliasghar scored for Iranian team.

Iran will play host Brazil on Tues-day.

The Iranian delegation has won

one gold medal and three silvers so far.

Iran has participated at the 2016 Summer Paralympics with 111 ath-letes in 12 sports.

The Iranian delegation finished in 11th place in the previous edition, winning 10 gold medals, seven sil-vers and seven bronze medals.

(Source: Tasnim)

Iran wheelchair basketball team suf-fered its third loss in a row at the Paralympic Games.

In the match held at the ROA Hall, the Iranian team was defeated against Brazil 73-50 in Pool B.

Iran defeated Germany 69-63 in its opening match and lost to Great Britain 60-84 and USA 93-44 respectively in Pool B.

Iran will meet Algeria on Monday.

The Iranian delegation has won one gold medal and three silvers so far.

Iran has participated at the 2016 Summer Paralympics with 111 athletes in 12 sports.

The Iranian delegation finished in 11th place in the previous edition, win-ning 10 gold medals, seven silvers and seven bronze medals.

(Source: Tasnim)

Iran wheelchair basketball suffers third loss in row

Iran football 5-a-side defeats Morocco

Female Iranian rower Nazanin Molaei has demonstrated praiseworthy athletic skills and strength at the 2016 Asian Rowing Championships in China, and finished as the champion to receive a gold medal.

The Iranian sportswoman took part in the finals of women’s lightweight sin-gle sculls competitions at the Fenhu Wa-ter Sports Center in China’s eastern coastal Jiashan County, located 80 kilometers (49.7 miles) west of Shanghai, on Sunday, and recorded 7 minutes and 49.51 second to

stand top of the podium. She fought for the honor against rowers

from China, Hong Kong, Kazakhstan, the Philippines and Thailand.

Separately, Iranian team, consisting of Parisa Ahmadi, Farahnaz Eshghi, Mayam Omidi-Parsa and Maryam Karami, partic-ipated in women’s team quad sculls con-tests, and finished runner-up to pick up a silver medal.

Mahsa Javar faced representatives from China, Chinese Taipei, Kazakhstan, Singa-pore and South Korea in the final round of women’s heavyweight single scull class, and

settled for a bronze medal.In the women’s team coxless four show-

down, the Iranian outfit of Molaei, Nazanin Rahmani, Javar and Eshghi landed in the third slot and pocketed a bronze medal.

The 2016 Asian Rowing Championships started in Jiashan County, China, on Septem-ber 9, and will conclude on September 13.

The championships have attracted 210 male and female athletes from 13 national rowing federations.

(Source: PressTV)

Iran’s Molaei awarded gold in 2016 Asian Rowing Championships

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With a powerful arm and the strength of the wrist To break the five fingers of a poor man is sin.

Sadi

Poem of the day

SINCE 1979Prayer Times

TEHRAN — A number of cultural fig-ures and literati gathered on Saturday

at Tehran’s Imam Ali (AS) Religious Arts Museum to cele-brate the 72nd birthday of children’s book writer Hushang Moradi Kermani.

Stage actor and director Iraj Raad, actor Dariush Arjo-mand, as well as the director of the Art and Cultural Or-ganization of Tehran Municipality, Mahmud Salahi, attend-ed the ceremony.

Pointing to the small number of plays written by Moradi Kermani, Raad hoped that the writer would get the chance to write more plays.

“Talking about Moradi Kermani is hard since he pos-sesses a precious, world-famous character, while it is also easy because he is very sincere and very charming, and has always lived far from pride,” Raad noted.

In his brief words Dariush Arjomand also said, “Moradi Kermani has been successful in paying due attention and enlivening the part of literature that had been ignored.

“Moradi Kermani is frank with his book readers and nothing but straightforwardness is found in his character,” he added.

“His stories might seem very unpretentious but they carry deep information. They bear things which are need-ed for the younger generation of today,” Arjomand added.

Mahmud Salahi also called Moradi Kermani an adult who has not forgotten his childhood, and has been friend with many children via his simple stories.

“Our children play with these stories and the writers make their future with their stories, and we must ask God for more good writers like Moradi Kermani,” he remarked.

“I have been through many difficulties so that I could be a writer and here I must say I write in order to be alive and not for anything else,” the writer said on his part.

Several Iranian movies and TV-series, including “Mom’s Guest” directed by Dariush Mehrjuii and “The Stories of Majid” by Kiumars Purahmad, have been produced based on Moradi Kermani’s works of the same names.

An English translation of his autobiography “You’re No Stranger Here” (also known as “Believe It or Not”) by Caroline Croskery was also released by the Candle & Fog Publishing Ltd. during the London Book Fair this year in April.

His “The Water Urn” and “A Sweet Jam” had previously been translated into English.

TEHRAN — The Iran Cultural Fairs Insti-tute (ICFI) organized the celebration of

Iran’s Day at the 29th Moscow International Book Fair on Saturday, the fourth day of the fair.

Iranian and cultural officials including the general direc-tor of the Moscow International Book Fair, Sergey V. Kaykin, and Iran Cultural Fairs Institute Director Amir-Masud Shah-ramnia were among the attendees at the ceremony.

Speaking at the ceremony, Shahramnia pointed to the cultural interactions between Iran and Russia and said that the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Islam-ic Guidance has begun a new project to support the translation of literary works of the two countries, ICFI has published in a press release.

In his brief speech Sergey V. Kaykin also expressed sat-isfaction that there has been good relations between the book fairs of Iran and Moscow during the past two years.

Russia was the guest of honor at the 29th Tehran Inter-national Book Fair in May 2016, while Iran was the guest of

honor at the 28th Moscow International Book Fair in 2015.The ceremony was followed by a short speech delivered

by the writer of the book “Our Iran”, Ahmad Kahtami, who

is also the dean of the Department of Persian Language and Literature of Tehran’s Shahid Beheshti University.

A Russian version of “Our Iran”, which is about Iranian art and cultural heritage, the book has been published by the Moscow-based Sadra Publications.

He said that the book was written to help boost bilateral cultural relations, while it also tries to introduce Iran’s tourist attractions and cultural heritage in the best way possible.

“Our Iran” also contains material about Persian lit-erature, various types of Persian art, and cinema and theater in Iran.

The 29th Moscow International Book Fair ran from September 7 to 11.

A Russian version of a collection of ten books by Ira-nian authors was displayed at the fair. They included four books from Seyyed Mehdi Shojaei’s series for children “Philosophy for Children”, and works from Persian clas-sical literature, including Sadi’s “Bustan” and “Gulistan”, and Rumi’s “Masnavi-ye Manavi”.

TORONTO (Reuters) — When veteran filmmaker Oliver Stone was casting an actor to play former NSA contrac-tor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden in a film, he said he went to only one person - Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

“I don’t know why, he just looked like, and felt like, and acted like he was one of that generation, very much the same age and computer knowledgeable,” Stone told Reu-ters last month in Los Angeles.

“Snowden,” which had its world premiere on Friday at

the Toronto International Film Festival and hits theaters on September 16, sees Gordon-Levitt, 35, play the 33-year-old Snowden through a decade of his life.

Gordon-Levitt, who achieved fame as a child actor in television series “3rd Rock from the Sun,” said that by play-ing Snowden, he hoped to understand his motivations.

“I was kind of trying to figure out why he did what he did, what was going on in his head,” he said. “And one of the questions everyone asks is, ‘Why didn’t he just, you know,

voice his concerns through proper channels?’“The film leads up to the events of 2013, when Snowden

fled the United States after exposing the government’s mass surveillance programs to journalist Glenn Greenwald and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras.

The U.S. government filed espionage charges against Snowden and he was granted asylum in Russia, where he has lived since, with his friend Lindsay Mills. Actress Shailene Woodley plays Mills in the film.

Noon:13:00 Evening: 7:32 Dawn: 5:21 (tomorrow) Sunrise: 6:46 (tomorrow)

PICTURE OF THE DAY Honaronline /Ramona Mirian

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(L-R) Producer Manuchehr Mohammadi, cinema owner Mohammad Khadem, actress Fatemeh Motamed-Arya and film expert Alireza Rezadad accept lifetime achievement awards during the 18th Iran Cinema Celebration at Tehran’s Eyvan Shams on September 10, 2016.

Tehran museum celebrates Hushang Moradi Kermani’s 72nd birthday

Actor Ewan McGregor admits to nerves in debut

as directorTORONTO (Reuters) — Scottish actor Ewan McGregor admitted to being “very nervous” about making his directorial debut with the movie adaptation of Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “American Pastoral”.

The film, which premiered Friday night at the Toronto International Film Festival, also sees McGregor in the lead role of the hard-working man in late 1960s America whose family be-gins to fall apart after his daughter Merry (Da-kota Fanning) becomes politically radicalized.

McGregor, 45, said he had spent years waiting for the right directorial opportunity to emerge but felt pressure in interpreting Roth’s work on the big screen.

“I was very nervous,” said the star of “Trainspotting” at a news conference on Saturday.“I think it’s a massive responsibility to take on - a responsibility to the produc-ers, a responsibility to Philip Roth, a respon-sibility to everybody who had read that novel and who liked that novel,” he added.

He also wanted to make sure the film “represented me in some way.”

McGregor said Roth has seen the film and reacted positively to the adaptation of his 1997 masterwork, voted one of Time magazine’s 100 greatest novels.

Vocalist Homayun Shajarian to tour Europe

Iranian films to go on screen at Zurich festival

Intl. Motion Picture Festival honors Iranian films

TEHRAN — Renowned Irani-an vocalist Homayun Shajarian is

planning a concert tour in Europe, which will begin in mid-October.

His ensemble will perform a selection of songs from the acclaimed albums “The Lords of the Secrets” and “The Mirrors” in France, the Netherlands and Bel-gium, as reported in a press release on Sunday.

The group features Sohrab Purnazeri on Kaman-cheh, Hossein Rezai and Ain Meshkatian on percussion, Mahyar Tarihi on santur and Milad Mohammadi on tar.

TEHRAN — Two Iranian films will go on screen at the 12th Zurich

Film Festival, which will be held at the Swiss city from September 22 to October 2.

Asghar Farhadi’s acclaimed drama “The Salesman” will be screened at the Gala Premieres section of the festival, while Mehrdad Oskui’s documentary “Starless Dreams” will be shown in the Border Lines section.

Oskui is scheduled to attend the screening of “Star-less Dreams”, which will be followed by a review session.

TEHRAN — Three Iranian films won awards in different sections

of the International Motion Picture Festival, which was held in Helena, in the western U.S. state of Montana from September 5 to 7.

Iranian director Shahram Maslakhi’s war drama “Lovers Die Standing” won the best feature film award.

The best experimental animation award went to “Junk Girl” by Mohammad Zare’ and Shalaleh Kheiri, while “A Silhouette” by Keikavus Yakideh received the best experimental film award.

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No gap between artists and the government: culture minister 1 “In a world where all countries have been captured by Hollywood cinema, Iranian filmmakers produce films that people from all walks of life line up for hours to watch,” Ayyubi said.

He also predicted “good days and months” for Iranian cine-ma and added, “The production movement is moving forward and today is the day of our identity.”

The Iranian House of Cinema organizes a celebration annually on the National Day of Cinema honor-ing the best productions of Iranian cinema in all categories.

Winners in the categories of an-imation, documentary and short films were announced over the two past weeks, but the main celebra-tion, which was scheduled to be held on the National Day of Cinema, has been postponed indefinitely.

However, actress Fatemeh Mot-amed-Arya, producer Manuchehr

Mohammadi, film expert Alireza Rezadad and cinema owner Mo-hammad Khadem received lifetime achievement awards as part of the celebration on Saturday night at Tehran’s Eyvan Shams.

Iran’s Day observed at Moscow Book Fair

Gordon-Levitt examines whistleblower’s motivations in ‘Snowden’

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N E W SDenzel Washington says “The Magnificent Seven” like being a kid againVENICE (Reuters) — As a pastor’s son, Denzel Washington never got to watch Westerns as a child, but playing around with guns and horses in Antoine Fuqua’s remake of “The Magnificent Seven” was like being a kid again, he said at the Venice film festival on Saturday.

Fuqua’s take on a story about hired guns in the Old West protecting a town from thieves will close the 73rd edition of the world’s oldest film festival on Saturday. It premiered in Toronto and screens in Venice in the out-of-competition section.

“To ride around on a horse, spinning guns and doing all that is like being a kid again, it’s really fun and they actually paid us,” Wash-ington, 61, told a news conference. “I love my horse, I miss my horse.”

Writer Hushang Moradi Kermani poses beside his picture singed by a number of officials and artists during his 72nd birthday celebration at the Imam Ali (AS) Religious Arts Museum on September 10, 2016. (Honaron-line/Mojtaba Arabzadeh)