Emir to attend Education Excellence Day event
QNA/Doha
HH the Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani will attend the Supreme Education Council’s event to mark Education Excellence Day (EED) tomorrow.
The EED seeks to promote innovation and to develop a culture of excellence in the Qatari society, especially in education, to improve outcomes of the educational process.
It also aims at improving the general academic scene in the country by integrating efforts of an individual with that of the institution and through adoption of international standards of excellence.
The Excellence Day Award recognises outstanding achievement in different categories including outstanding high school graduates, university graduates, PhD holders, schools, scientific research and teachers in Qatar.
The awards cover six categories, namely: The ‘Distinguished Secondary Student’, the ‘Distinguished University Graduate’, the ‘Distinguished PhD Holder’, the ‘Distinguished Teacher’, the ‘Distinguished School’, and the ‘Distinguished Secondary Research Paper’.
It illustrates the commitment of Qatar’s leadership to honor and encourage distinguished Qataris and expresses the leadership’s deep belief that the most precious treasures of Qatar are its human resource.
Qatar participates
in FAO regional
conference
QNA/Doha
Qatar participated in the 32nd session of the Regional Conference for the Near East of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), which was held at the organisation’s headquarters in Rome.
Qatar’s delegation to the meeting was led by HE the Minister of Environment Ahmed Amer Mohamed al-Humaidi.
On the sidelines of the Conference, the Minister of Environment met the FAO Director-General, Jose Graziano da Silva, to discuss co-operation between the State of Qatar and the international organisation.
FAO Regional Conference discusses challenges related to food and agriculture.
TIEP participants nearing halfway milestone
Twenty-three entrepreneurs in Qatar will soon reach the halfway milestone in Qatar Science & Technology Park’s Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Programme (TIEP).
TIEP is one of the most rigorous programmes helping technology entrepreneurs understand commercial strategies and break into the region’s rapidly emerging start-up scene, according to a statement from QSTP.
TIEP participants have wrapped up the first module of the programme, focusing on Technology Analysis, and are pushing ahead with the second of four. The Technology Analysis module saw two fast-paced, high-energy workshops from both local and international leaders in the field.
The current module, Market Analysis, started in January and teaches the fundamentals of mapping market structure and dynamics and understanding precisely how an idea or innovative technology project can be positioned in the market. Participants have been in the field speaking to potential customers to determine how well their ideas and models satisfy unmet market needs.
Already, the 2013-2014 cohort of TIEP has welcomed special lectures by Christina Chase from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s famed Sloan School of Management and serial entrepreneur Dr Maher Hakim, who spent two decades in the San Francisco Bay area and now teaches at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar.
TIEP’s faculty of practitioners, diverse student profile, cutting-edge tools and methodologies, as well as the focus on developing real-world projects, set it apart from other programmes and have earned it acclaim as it enters its fifth year, the statement adds.
Projects anchor TIEP coursework, giving students the opportunity to hone their skills on advanced-stage, real-world technologies being evaluated for their commercial viability. This year’s projects include a spray vaccine for a disease afflicting the global poultry industry, minimally-invasive robotic surgery programmes, nanoparticle-based diagnostic tests for serious infections and voltage balancing converters for solar energy systems.
Each project has been awarded a National Priorities Research Programme Cycle 4 Grant by the Qatar National Research Fund, linking TIEP to Qatar’s wider entrepreneurial ecosystem and ensuring that coursework is valuable and applicable beyond the classroom.
Eighteen private and public sector organisations are represented in the 2013-2014 TIEP cohort, including employees from Shell, Hamad Medical Corporation, Msheireb Properties, RasGas, Aspetar and Texas A&M University at Qatar.
Hamad al-Kuwari, managing director of QSTP, said: “The rigorous and practical TIEP programme continues to be a bright spot in Qatar’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, empowering some of Qatar’s sharpest minds in academia, industry and government with the skills needed to make a splash in the commercial marketplace.”
More than half of the programme’s participants are Qatari nationals or long-term residents who have lived in Qatar for over 10 years.
For details, visit http://www.qstp.org.qa/tiep
578 complaints lodged at
embassy in two months
The Labour and Community Welfare Section of the Indian embassy received 578 complaints in the first two months of 2014, the monthly community house at the embassy was told on Friday.
In 2012, the mission received 3,385 complaints while 3,558 complaints were lodged at the embassy last year.
A total of 64 Indian nationals are currently housed at the Central Prison and 138 at the Deportation Centre, it was informed.
Until Friday, 44 deaths of the Indian nationals were reported this year. Of them 20 were in the month of February. In 2012, the deaths of 237 Indian nationals were reported and last year saw 241 deaths.
On the basis of requests received from the Qatari authorities for travel documents of the detainees in the Deportation Centre, the embassy issued 10 Emergency Certificates (ECs) in February. The Embassy also issued three tickets in February to those Indian nationals who could not bear their travel expenses, to facilitate their deportation to India.
The Indian Community Benevolent Forum (ICBF) has been providing air tickets, medical assistance and financial assistance to those in need.
The community house was also informed about the death of five Indian nationals in Thursday’s gas explosion at a restaurant in Duhail area. Twelve are undergoing treatment at hospitals. The Embassy is in touch with all concerned, for the repatriation of the mortal remains of the deceased to their respective native places in India.
QNHG to hold monthly meeting
Qatar Natural History Group (QNHG) will hold its monthly meeting at the Doha English Speaking School on March 5, at 7pm.The guest speaker will be Neil Morris, birdwatching expert. The talk is entitled, “The Joys and Perils of Birdwatching in Qatar.” New members are welcome to join. QNHG membership facilitates participation in archaeological and geological field trips. Further details of the talk and a map of the venue can be found in the Monthly Talks section on www.qnhg.org
Qatar delegation for UN meet
Qatar will participate in the 45th session of the Statistical Commission of the United Nations, to be held at the UN headquarters in New York from March 4-7, reports QNA.
HE the Minister of Development Planning and Statistics Dr Saleh Mohamed al-Nabit will lead the Qatar delegation at the meeting. The session will discuss a number of topics including the application of the fundamental principles of official statistics at the international level, as well as working papers related to the measurement of social welfare, development and progress, monitoring the Millennium Development Goals, and implications of the statistical plan for international development after 2015.
Three get jail term for stealing woman’s bag
A Criminal Court has sentenced three Asians, two of them in absentia, to six months in jail for stealing the bag of a Qatari woman from a Doha mall. While the main culprit was caught by the woman’s husband at the scene, two of his accomplices evaded arrest. The involvement of the two accomplices in the crime came to the fore after a video footage of the incident was presented to the police by the manager of the mall. During investigations, the police found that the individuals who escaped had been previously accused of a similar incident in another mall, a report in a local Arabic daily said. Considering the testimony of the witnesses and the confession of the captured person, the court sentenced the accused under Articles 29/3, 38/1 and 340/1 and Article 77/2 of the Penal Law, to six months in prison followed by deportation.
Rights activists get training on issues
QNA/Doha
A five-day course on human rights in the Arab region organised by the National Human Rights Committee (NHRC) in co-operation with the Human Rights Information and Training Center (HRITC) concluded in Doha yesterday.
Thirty human rights activists from a number of Arab countries attended the training course which focused on principles and issues of human rights, Paris Principles for establishing National Human Rights Institutions, the International Bill of Human Rights, and civil and political and economic, social and cultural rights.
Director of Programmes and Education Department at NHRC Sheikha Jawhara Mohamed al-Thani said that the participants were trained on regional protection mechanisms, regional human rights instruments and the convention against torture, international humanitarian law (IHL), international criminal court mechanisms, its role in strengthening the system of human rights, the United Nations convention on the rights of the child and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).”