Guillaume Siemienski with his wife, Maka Cielecka.
Guillaume Siemienski with his wife, Maka Cielecka.

Victims of Haitian earthquake whose contribution to the nation will be greatly missed



Joseph Serge Miot Elected the ninth Roman Catholic archbishop of Port-au-Prince in 2008, Monsignor Joseph Serge Miot, 65, was killed when his office by the city's cathedral collapsed in the earthquake. Seminaries, churches, monasteries, convents and offices have all been destroyed, said the papal nuncio in Haiti. Serge Miot ran a large diocese of more than 80 parishes serving a local population of four million, of whom an estimated 60 per cent are Roman Catholic. "He was a demanding and understanding priest, a man of great discretion and humility," said Father Michel Ménard, the superior general of the Society of the Priests of Saint Jacques, a missionary order. "He was very welcoming to his priests."

He was born in 1946 in western Haiti and after studying in Port-au-Prince and Rome, he was ordained a priest in 1975 and initially served in his home town of Jeremie. In 1997, Pope John Paul II named him bishop coadjutor, or assistant, of Port-au-Prince before he became archbishop in 2008. Zilda Arns Zilda Arns, 75, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 and was a household name in her native Brazil for founding in 1983 Pastoral da Crianca, or Pastoral Care for Children, a Catholic aid group that trains mothers in basic healthcare.

Her group works in 42,000 Brazilian communities, with 260,000 trained volunteers attending to 1.8 million children under the age of six. In communities where the Pastoral is present, the infant mortality rate is 11 per 1,000 births. In Brazil overall, it is 22.5. Arns has been compared to Mother Teresa and was in Haiti visiting a missionary organisation when the earthquake struck. She studied medicine at Curitiba University and after graduating in 1959 she worked as a paediatrician in the city's children's hospital.

In her final speech, given in Haiti last week, Arns said: "Just like birds who care for their little ones, building nests high up in the trees or mountains, far away from the reach of predators, and closer to God, so too must we take care of our children ... promoting and respecting their rights and protecting them." She is survived by four children and 10 grandchildren.

Luiz Carlos da Costa Michele Montas, a former United Nations spokeswoman who returned to her native Haiti a month ago, received a call from Luiz Carlos da Costa, the deputy UN head in Haiti, to apologise because he might be late for a dinner engagement at her Port-au-Prince home later that evening. He never made it. The earthquake hit around 5pm that day and he was later found under the rubble of the UN headquarters along with members of the Chinese delegation he was meeting, Ms Montas said in a UN briefing this week.

Born in 1949 in Brazil, da Costa worked for the UN for more than 40 years, including posts in Kosovo and Liberia. He had served in Haiti as principal deputy special representative since last November. Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, called da Costa a "legend" of UN peacekeeping operations. "His extraordinary professionalism and dedication were matched only by his charisma and warmth and his devotion to his many friends," Mr Ban said. "His legacy lives in the thousands that serve under the blue flag in every corner of the globe."

Da Costa is survived by his wife and two daughters. Doug Coates "Doug always closed his meetings and correspondence with the same phrase: 'Working together in the service of peace'," said Raf Souccar of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) about Doug Coates, his former colleague who was deputy police commissioner for the UN stabilisation mission in Haiti. "He was a great person trying to do great things for a country in great need of help. We will miss him," Mr Souccar told the Ottawa Citizen newspaper.

Coates, 52, was killed when the UN headquarters collapsed in the earthquake. He was first deployed to Haiti in 1993 but civil unrest forced him and his fellow officers to leave the country. A graduate of the University of Ottawa and the Royal Military College, he started his RCMP career in 1979 and became part of an elite emergency response team in Ottawa. He had been responsible for all Canadian international police operations including Afghanistan.

"Doug Coates was a long-serving member of the international law-enforcement community," said Mr Ban said. "He was a true friend of Haiti and the United Nations." Coates left behind a wife and three children. Jimmy O Jimmy O, a 35-year-old Haitian rap artist whose real name was Jean Jimmy Alexandre, is believed to have been killed when his vehicle was crushed in the earthquake. He was identified by the passport in his pocket. He was just preparing to release Destiny, his debut album, and also worked with Yele Haiti, a charity run by Wyclef Jean, his friend and former member of the pop group The Fugees. Jimmy O was signed to Jean's label, Sak Pase Records.

Jimmy O, a Port-au-Prince native, lived in New York and was survived by his wife and three children. He had returned to Haiti to work on his music, said Haitian Fresh, or James Carter, a friend and rap singer. "I mean he was just chasing his dream and he went to Haiti to promote a mixed tape. You know, to promote a mix tape and to die just like that is just indescribable," he told CNN.

Georges Anglade and Mireille Neptune Anglade Georges Anglade, 65, was on an extended visit to Haiti with his wife, Mireille, when the earthquake struck, causing the family home in which they were staying to collapse. They both died and are survived by a daughter. He escaped from Haiti to Canada in 1969 and was imprisoned by the Duvalier regime on his return in 1974. He was later a government minister under Jean-Bertrand Aristide and returned to Canada in 1996.

Mireille Anglade taught French in Montreal and earned a doctorate in economics. She was active among women's groups in Haiti. Soon after Georges Anglade was appointed as an adviser to Mr Aristide after his election as president in 1991, he said, "If we can just move Haiti from misery to poverty, we will have done a lot." In Canada, he worked as a professor of geography at the Montreal campus of the University of Quebec. In 2008, he founded the Haitian chapter of the charity PEN, which seeks freedom of expression for writers.

He wrote a book of short stories called Rire Haitien/Haitian Laughter. Lisa Mbele-Mbong Lisa Mbele-Mbong was a human rights officer with the UN who left behind a 10-year-old son and her parents. She grew up in Geneva and was the daughter of a mother from Minneapolis and a father from Cameroon. "Lisa was an incredible woman, strong and generous and dedicated," said Anne Hornung-Soukup, who was a fellow student at Smith College in the United States. "I will miss her greatly."

Mbele-Mbong, 38, was in a meeting in a basement room of the UN headquarters in Haiti when the earthquake started, according to The Washington Post. She walked on to a veranda where a slab of concrete hit her, killing her instantly. She spent a lot time working in Haiti, volunteering twice as an election monitor and later as a consultant for the National Democratic Institute, trying to foster civic education.

Guillaume Siemienski On assignment to the UN from the Canadian International Development Agency (Cida), Guillaume Siemienski only recently arrived in Haiti after previous postings in Georgia, Russia, Turkey and Slovakia. He was working at the UN headquarters, which collapsed in the earthquake. Stephen Harper, the Canadian prime minister, said his death was "a reminder of the sacrifice Canadian men and women... are willing to make in order to bring Canadian generosity and aid to Haiti and the world."

A native of Montreal and graduate of McGill University, he joined Cida in 1999. "He was the sunshine of the family," Maya Siemienska said of her brother Guillaume, who was in his mid-50s. "It's night-time without him. He didn't want to do bureaucratic work. He wanted to do something positive, something concrete." :Hédi Annabi Hédi Annabi, the United Nations mission chief in Haiti killed in last week's earthquake, used to keep a blue pencil handy for marking up documents - every single one that crossed his desk.

"He was a model of dedication and diligence," remembered Nick Birnback, a spokesman for the UN's Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DOPK), who worked closely with Mr Annabi for over a decade. "Every day he was first into the office, last out." Annabi, of Tunisia, died at his post when the earthquake collapsed the headquarters of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti in Port-au-Prince. He was 65 years old.

After working in Tunisia's foreign service, Mr Annabi joined the UN in 1981 as a desk officer for Cambodia before shifting to the newly established DOPK in 1992. "He was a founder of UN peacekeeping," Mr Birnback said. Annabi worked on dozens of peacekeeping efforts, rising to assistant secretary general before taking over the Haiti mission in 2007. "He gave of himself - with energy, discipline and great bravery," Mr Ban said on Saturday after Annabi's death was confirmed, calling him the "gold standard of service against which all who had the privilege to work with him were measured".

@Email:foreign.desk@thenational.ae

COMPANY PROFILE

Name: Xpanceo

Started: 2018

Founders: Roman Axelrod, Valentyn Volkov

Based: Dubai, UAE

Industry: Smart contact lenses, augmented/virtual reality

Funding: $40 million

Investor: Opportunity Venture (Asia)

ULTRA PROCESSED FOODS

- Carbonated drinks, sweet or savoury packaged snacks, confectionery, mass-produced packaged breads and buns 

- margarines and spreads; cookies, biscuits, pastries, cakes, and cake mixes, breakfast cereals, cereal and energy bars;

- energy drinks, milk drinks, fruit yoghurts and fruit drinks, cocoa drinks, meat and chicken extracts and instant sauces

- infant formulas and follow-on milks, health and slimming products such as powdered or fortified meal and dish substitutes,

- many ready-to-heat products including pre-prepared pies and pasta and pizza dishes, poultry and fish nuggets and sticks, sausages, burgers, hot dogs, and other reconstituted meat products, powdered and packaged instant soups, noodles and desserts.

COMPANY PROFILE

Name: Haltia.ai
Started: 2023
Co-founders: Arto Bendiken and Talal Thabet
Based: Dubai, UAE
Industry: AI
Number of employees: 41
Funding: About $1.7 million
Investors: Self, family and friends

Herc's Adventures

Developer: Big Ape Productions
Publisher: LucasArts
Console: PlayStation 1 & 5, Sega Saturn
Rating: 4/5

COMPANY PROFILE

Company: Mascotte Health

Started: 2023

Based: Miami, US

Founder: Bora Hamamcioglu

Sector: Online veterinary service provider

Investment stage: $1.2 million raised in seed funding

Movie: Saheb, Biwi aur Gangster 3

Producer: JAR Films

Director: Tigmanshu Dhulia

Cast: Sanjay Dutt, Jimmy Sheirgill, Mahie Gill, Chitrangda Singh, Kabir Bedi

Rating: 3 star

UAE SQUAD

 Khalid Essa (Al Ain), Ali Khaseif (Al Jazira), Adel Al Hosani (Sharjah), Mahmoud Khamis (Al Nasr), Yousef Jaber (Shabab Al Ahli Dubai), Khalifa Al Hammadi (Jazira), Salem Rashid (Jazira), Shaheen Abdelrahman (Sharjah), Faris Juma (Al Wahda), Mohammed Shaker (Al Ain), Mohammed Barghash (Wahda), Abdulaziz Haikal (Shabab Al Ahli), Ahmed Barman (Al Ain), Khamis Esmail (Wahda), Khaled Bawazir (Sharjah), Majed Surour (Sharjah), Abdullah Ramadan (Jazira), Mohammed Al Attas (Jazira), Fabio De Lima (Al Wasl), Bandar Al Ahbabi (Al Ain), Khalfan Mubarak (Jazira), Habib Fardan (Nasr), Khalil Ibrahim (Wahda), Ali Mabkhout (Jazira), Ali Saleh (Wasl), Caio (Al Ain), Sebastian Tagliabue (Nasr).

Essentials
The flights: You can fly from the UAE to Iceland with one stop in Europe with a variety of airlines. Return flights with Emirates from Dubai to Stockholm, then Icelandair to Reykjavik, cost from Dh4,153 return. The whole trip takes 11 hours. British Airways flies from Abu Dhabi and Dubai to Reykjavik, via London, with return flights taking 12 hours and costing from Dh2,490 return, including taxes. 
The activities: A half-day Silfra snorkelling trip costs 14,990 Icelandic kronur (Dh544) with Dive.is. Inside the Volcano also takes half a day and costs 42,000 kronur (Dh1,524). The Jokulsarlon small-boat cruise lasts about an hour and costs 9,800 kronur (Dh356). Into the Glacier costs 19,500 kronur (Dh708). It lasts three to four hours.
The tours: It’s often better to book a tailor-made trip through a specialist operator. UK-based Discover the World offers seven nights, self-driving, across the island from £892 (Dh4,505) per person. This includes three nights’ accommodation at Hotel Husafell near Into the Glacier, two nights at Hotel Ranga and two nights at the Icelandair Hotel Klaustur. It includes car rental, plus an iPad with itinerary and tourist information pre-loaded onto it, while activities can be booked as optional extras. More information inspiredbyiceland.com

Result
Qualifier: Islamabad United beat Karachi Kings by eight wickets

Fixtures
Tuesday, Lahore: Eliminator 1 - Peshawar Zalmi v Quetta Gladiators
Wednesday, Lahore: Eliminator 2 – Karachi Kings v Winner of Eliminator 1
Sunday, Karachi: Final – Islamabad United v Winner of Eliminator 2

The new Turing Test

The Coffee Test

A machine is required to enter an average American home and figure out how to make coffee: find the coffee machine, find the coffee, add water, find a mug and brew the coffee by pushing the proper buttons.

Proposed by Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder

KEY DATES IN AMAZON'S HISTORY

July 5, 1994: Jeff Bezos founds Cadabra Inc, which would later be renamed to Amazon.com, because his lawyer misheard the name as 'cadaver'. In its earliest days, the bookstore operated out of a rented garage in Bellevue, Washington

July 16, 1995: Amazon formally opens as an online bookseller. Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought becomes the first item sold on Amazon

1997: Amazon goes public at $18 a share, which has grown about 1,000 per cent at present. Its highest closing price was $197.85 on June 27, 2024

1998: Amazon acquires IMDb, its first major acquisition. It also starts selling CDs and DVDs

2000: Amazon Marketplace opens, allowing people to sell items on the website

2002: Amazon forms what would become Amazon Web Services, opening the Amazon.com platform to all developers. The cloud unit would follow in 2006

2003: Amazon turns in an annual profit of $75 million, the first time it ended a year in the black

2005: Amazon Prime is introduced, its first-ever subscription service that offered US customers free two-day shipping for $79 a year

2006: Amazon Unbox is unveiled, the company's video service that would later morph into Amazon Instant Video and, ultimately, Amazon Video

2007: Amazon's first hardware product, the Kindle e-reader, is introduced; the Fire TV and Fire Phone would come in 2014. Grocery service Amazon Fresh is also started

2009: Amazon introduces Amazon Basics, its in-house label for a variety of products

2010: The foundations for Amazon Studios were laid. Its first original streaming content debuted in 2013

2011: The Amazon Appstore for Google's Android is launched. It is still unavailable on Apple's iOS

2014: The Amazon Echo is launched, a speaker that acts as a personal digital assistant powered by Alexa

2017: Amazon acquires Whole Foods for $13.7 billion, its biggest acquisition

2018: Amazon's market cap briefly crosses the $1 trillion mark, making it, at the time, only the third company to achieve that milestone

In numbers

Number of Chinese tourists coming to UAE in 2017 was... 1.3m

Alibaba’s new ‘Tech Town’  in Dubai is worth... $600m

China’s investment in the MIddle East in 2016 was... $29.5bn

The world’s most valuable start-up in 2018, TikTok, is valued at... $75bn

Boost to the UAE economy of 5G connectivity will be... $269bn 

Seemar’s top six for the Dubai World Cup Carnival:

1. Reynaldothewizard
2. North America
3. Raven’s Corner
4. Hawkesbury
5. New Maharajah
6. Secret Ambition

CHELSEA SQUAD

Arrizabalaga, Bettinelli, Rudiger, Christensen, Silva, Chalobah, Sarr, Azpilicueta, James, Kenedy, Alonso, Jorginho, Kante, Kovacic, Saul, Barkley, Ziyech, Pulisic, Mount, Hudson-Odoi, Werner, Havertz, Lukaku. 


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