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AMMAN — Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour said that the Geneva II peace conference on Syria would not immediately restore stability in the civil war-torn northern neighbour.

“We do not believe that this conference would result in an immediate solution to the Syrian crisis, but would trigger talks that would hopefully end with such a solution,” he said during a Lower House session held on Tuesday.

His remarks came in response to MPs’ inquiries over the political and security atmosphere in the region.

He reiterated Jordan’s support for a political solution that would ensure Syria’s territorial integrity and the unity of its people.

In case the conference comes up with resolutions for a peaceful solution to the 34-month bloody conflict in Syria, Jordan might be pushing for a UN Security Council resolution to render the conference’s outputs mandatory.

In connection to US State Secretary John Kerry’s efforts to push the Middle East peace talks forward, Ensour advised against “jumping to conclusions” at this stage, expecting the US top diplomat to bring his finalised ideas to all parties in the region in the next few days.

Kerry was examining points of views of both the Palestinians and the Israelis, and it is expected he will come back with a detailed proposal for both sides, the premier said.

Regarding future security arrangements in the Jordan Valley, Ensour said that Jordan would under no circumstances accept any foreign soldier on its turf or any Jordanian troops on Palestinian lands. 

AMMAN — The Queen Rania Centre for Entrepreneurship (QRCE) has announced the conclusion of the semi-final phase of its 2013 contest.

The Queen Rania National Entrepreneurship Competition aims to “develop the spirit of entrepreneurship among Jordanian university students and aspiring entrepreneurs from the local community” to enable them to transform their creative ideas into successful projects in the various fields of the technology sector, according to a QRCE statement issued this week.

Around 43 per cent of the applicants to the competition’s sixth edition were females.

The ideas put forward by the participants were evaluated during the first phase of the competition, which resulted in 252 participants qualifying to the second phase of the contest, the statement said.

“These youths joined a boot camp supervised by a group of experts in start-up management. They were trained in strategic planning, and customer and business development in accordance with the latest practices in the domain.”

Twenty-six teams qualified to the next stage after their draft business plans were evaluated, according to the centre. They submitted their projects after reflecting what they had learned in the training camp.

The award’s management then designated a mentor to help each team improve its plan and strategy before the final business plans were submitted and evaluated thoroughly to enter the final stage of the competition.

The finalists were two from the start-ups category, 13 from the pre-start-up category and six from the universities category, the statement said.

QRCE Executive Director Farhan Kalaldeh said that the objective of the current edition is to focus on educating and attracting young and promising entrepreneurs who have creative ideas, fledgling enterprises and start-ups from various cities in the country.

The number of participants in the current edition reached more than 500 young men and women split into 250 teams, the statement quoted Kalaldeh as saying.

Around 70 per cent of the participants were from outside Amman.

In its sixth edition, the competition received support from the US government’s Middle East Partnership Initiative, Intel Corporation and the Arab Potash Company.

The value of the competition’s prizes reached JD20,000, according to the statement.

QRCE was established in 2004 to help develop technology entrepreneurship in Jordan.

AMMAN — Microsoft Jordan is planning to implement a series of initiatives starting next month to educate secondary school and university students on how to develop apps for Windows.

In early February, the software giant will hold an event gathering students from several private schools to brief them about the IT sector, how to compete in the field and the employment opportunities it offers, Ayman Afaneh, Microsoft Jordan’s developer and platform evangelist lead, told The Jordan Times this week.

“We want to educate schoolchildren about opportunities in the IT field before they join university so they can better understand the sector, which is likely to help them make a decision about the major they will pursue,” Afaneh said.

Students from about 10 schools will be invited to take part in the event, he said, adding that Microsoft Jordan is keen on expanding the initiative, dubbed “Technology Rocks”, to public schools at a later stage.

Microsoft Jordan will also train participating students on app development, after which they will return to their schools and form teams to work on a certain project or app that serves the community, Afaneh added.

In late April, the company is scheduled to announce the names of students who created the best apps, he said.

In addition, Microsoft Jordan will cooperate with IT faculties at the country’s universities to provide students with tools and software that help them develop apps.

“These tools will be available for university students for free so they can train themselves and engage in creating apps,” he added.

“By giving the necessary tools for app development, we seek to empower Jordanian university students to be competitive and learn new skills in the field that will help them find jobs in the future,” Afaneh noted. 

AMMAN — The Generations For Peace Institute on Tuesday announced postgraduate scholarship opportunities as part of a new partnership with the University of the Western Cape’s Interdisciplinary Centre of Excellence for Sport Science and Development (ICESSD).

The programme offers a "rare opportunity for PhD candidates to conduct research on Sport for Peace and Development, with a specific focus on sport–based approaches to conflict transformation addressing local issues of conflict and violence at the grass roots in communities," Generations For Peace (GFP) said in a statement e-mailed to The Jordan Times.

The partnership continues the institute’s investment in local research hubs to support innovation, quality, impact and sustainability of its programmes in different continents. Recognising the limited opportunities available to students in Africa to progress to PhD studies, the scholarships will be a valuable boost to local research, the statement said.

Highlighting the importance of the scholarships, ICESSD Director Marion Keim said the partnership would “promote research, teaching and community engagement in the crucial area of sport for peace and development to empower our students and to foster social change, and to live up as much as we can and wherever we are to Nelson Mandela’s legacy.”

HRH Prince Feisal, founder and chairman of GFP, said they were looking forward to welcoming the selected candidates. "Learning and education are at the heart of our organisation, and we are confident that the scholarship holders will be a great asset in our efforts to support positive change in local communities facing conflict and violence,” the statement quoted the prince as saying.

Established in 2010 as the research and development arm of Generations For Peace, the Amman-based institute works in collaboration with GFP programmes, and with Georgetown University, the University of Oxford and the University of the Western Cape, to lead and support collaborative multi-disciplinary research, and to share knowledge and best practices across the peace-building community. 

AMMAN — The Lower House on Tuesday decided to seek the opinion of its Legal Committee over the Senate’s changes to the State Security Court (SSC) Law’s draft amendments.

MPs endorsed the amendments last month, excluding “resistance actions” against Israel from SSC’s jurisdiction, following a proposal to do so by Deputy Tareq Khoury (Zarqa, 1st District).

However, earlier this month, senators decided to remove the provision approved by MPs on “resistance actions” against Israel.

Senate President Abdur-Ra’uf S. Rawabdeh said the SSC Law is not the right legislation to include such a provision, arguing that it should be included under an anti-terrorism law.

The Upper House recommended that the government submit a draft anti-terrorism law to specify the crimes that fall under the category of terrorism.

During Tuesday’s Lower House session, deputies were divided over the Senate’s decision, deciding to look into it after the Legal Committee issues its recommendations.

The amended SSC Law limits the jurisdiction of the court to five crimes specified in the Constitution: treason, espionage, terrorism, drugs and money counterfeiting.

In November last year, the Lower House gave the bill urgency status and started deliberations over it immediately.

His Majesty King Abdullah had directed the government to change the law governing the SSC to ensure that trials are in conformity with the Constitution.

Under Article 101 of the Constitution: “No civilian may be tried in a criminal case where all its judges are not civilian, the exception to that are the crimes of treason, espionage, terrorism, the crimes of drugs and currency forgery.”

The government’s changes to the SSC Law ensure that civilians indicted on state security charges, other than those listed in the said constitutional article, are tried before a court whose judges are all civilians and one that is affiliated with the Judicial Council rather than the SSC.

AMMAN — Deputies on Tuesday endorsed amendments suggested by the government to the Penal Code to ensure that torture of any kind is deemed illegal and punishable by law.

At a Lower House session, MPs voted in favour of scrapping the term “types of illegal torture” from Paragraph 1 of Article 208 of the Penal Code, to avoid the implication that some types of torture are legal.

In its original wording, the paragraph stipulated a six-month to three-year prison term for anyone who inflicts “any type of torture unsanctioned by the law” on an individual to obtain a confession of a crime or information on one.

The government’s proposal considered “mental and moral torture” a crime, but the MPs limited the phrase to “moral torture”, excluding the word “mental” from it.

They argued that the word “moral” is a broader term that includes mental and other types of torture.

Jordan is a state party to the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

Meanwhile, the 149-strong Lower House endorsed the draft customs law and a bill to rectify the Free Trade Agreement between Jordan and Canada.

Also on Tuesday, the Lower House Legal Committee concluded its discussions over the draft Anti-Corruption Commission law.