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AMMAN — The Ministry of Social Development on Sunday launched an investigation to look into complaints received about violations at a Jerash disability care centre.

Social Development Minister Reem Abu Hassan has formed a committee to handle the investigation, according to Fawaz Ratrout, the ministry’s spokesperson.

“We have received complaints related to violations in the centre, and we want to check whether they exist or not,” Ratrout told The Jordan Times over the phone.

Although he was reluctant to comment on the type of violations, the spokesperson said some of them are related to abuse of centre residents.

“The committee started its work today [Sunday] and it will soon prepare a report on the situation of the centre over the past three years,” Ratrout said.

The centre, which is affiliated with the ministry, houses 200 people with moderate to severe mental disabilities, he added.

According to Population and Housing data for 2004, the disability rate in the country stands at 1.23 per cent of the population. 

The 2005 World Bank report on international disability rates, however, puts the rate at a minimum of 4-5 per cent, or 194,000 people.

Last year, the Ministry of Social Development shut down eight care centres and issued warnings to 14 others.

The ministry stepped up its efforts to inspect care centres in 2012 after a documentary aired by the BBC featured children being abused in several special education centres, turning the matter into an issue of public concern.

Following the documentary, His Majesty King Abdullah paid unannounced visits to several special education centres and issued directives to the government to investigate all facilities providing services to people with disabilities and hold accountable every person involved in violations.

To this end, the Social Development Ministry formed a committee to investigate the alleged violations, which is continuing to examine the situation of orphans and disability care centres across Jordan.

Several centres have been closed down or received warnings since then, while legal action has been taken against staff members found responsible for violations.

AMMAN –– Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour and a number of government officials are scheduled to attend a ceremony on Monday to lay the foundation stone for Porto Dead Sea, one of the biggest real estate development projects in the region. 

Egyptian developing company Amer Group says the $250 million venture on the eastern shores of the Dead Sea will be built on an area of 800,000 square metres. 

It will be the first city built on the Dead Sea mountains, as it will consist of four five-star hotels, an international health and spa centre, three malls, medical centres and 11,000 serviced apartments, according to details about the project posted on the website of Amer Group. 

The Egyptian firm, one of the largest real estate developers in the Middle East, expects the project to help increase hotel capacity in Jordan by 25 per cent.

The Porto is also expected to increase the number of local and foreign visitors to the Dead Sea by around half-a-million.

According to developers, the city will include four lakes, a dancing fountain, an amusement park, four swimming pools for women, 15 international restaurants and cafés, a cinema complex and 20 other swimming pools.

In February last year, the Cabinet approved the project, which is expected to provide around 3,000 job opportunities.

AMMAN — The Lower House on Sunday postponed deliberations over amendments to its Rules of Procedure, amid rising voices to put the regulations on the table for further changes to ensure on attendance commitment by deputies during sessions.

MPs only discussed one article from the bylaws, after which Deputy Mahmoud Kharabsheh (Balqa, 1st District) proposed postponing the discussions until a later stage.

Lower House Speaker Atef Tarawneh asked MPs to vote on this proposal, which obtained 50 votes out of the 101 deputies present in the 150-member House.

However, several MPs protested against the vote, with some claiming that it should be put to debate after MPs discuss the amendments, while others wanted Tarawneh to carry out the vote again.

The speaker then called for a revote, in which 56 MPs voted in favour of postponement. In response, Tarawneh adjourned the meeting until Tuesday morning.

“I suspect that there is a deliberate attempt to avoid discussing the amendments to this regulation today,” he said.

Several MPs also expressed their dissatisfaction with the outcome of the session, with some of them saying “postponing the meeting was the wrong action.”

After this announcement, Deputy Abdul Munim Odat (Irbid, 1st District), who heads the Legal Committee, urged his colleagues to submit their suggestions on amending the rules for the panel to examine.

Prior to Sunday’s session, deputies held what they described as a “consultative meeting” to discuss the proposed amendments to the Rules of Procedure, with 70 MPs in attendance.

Parliamentary sources told The Jordan Times that deputies are in disagreement over a provision in the proposed amendments that imposes a JD100 deduction on any lawmaker who does not attend a Lower House meeting without prior notification to the Permanent Office.

Other deputies also protested against what they described as “attempts to strip them of their constitutional rights in expressing their views under the Dome”, as the new amendments stipulate that MPs submit their suggestions over any draft legislations to the concerned committee and not while the session is in progress. 

AMMAN — More than 1,500 households across the Kingdom have installed solar panels to heat water as part of a nationwide project to encourage citizens to reduce energy consumption, according to the Jordan River Foundation (JRF).

Under the project, which started late in 2013, the number of beneficiary households is expected to reach over 2,500 by the end of this year, JRF Director General Ghaleb Qudah told The Jordan Times on Sunday.

The project is being carried out by the JRF in cooperation with the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources.

“There has been a great turnout of people, especially in rural and remote areas,” Qudah said.

To benefit from the initiative, Jordanians can apply to one or more of the 70 designated community-based organisations and they have the option of paying for the panels in instalments.

It is envisaged that 5,000 solar panels will be installed over the next five years, according to the JRF. 

Qudah also noted that the JRF has put on hold a project to distribute solar power generators to households across the country, due to a lack of finances.

“The idea of the project is to distribute devices that generate power using solar or wind energy to households, which will significantly reduce their consumption of electricity,” Qudah explained.

“We are in the process of looking for financing; once it is secured we will go ahead with the project,” he added.

Jordan has one of the highest annual daily averages of solar irradiance in the world with an estimated 330 days of sunshine per year.

The Kingdom, which annually imports over 95 per cent of its energy needs, is working on a series of renewable energy projects that will increase the contribution of local energy resources to the energy grid from the current 3 per cent to 40 per cent by 2020. 

AMMAN — A couple of years ago, Claire Verneil was an established lawyer specialised in criminal cases, a career that many dream of, but she decided to follow her heart instead and become a pastry chef.

“When I changed my life I was 35, so it is never too late… I was not in my 20s and I am blessed with my new career now,” the French chef told The Jordan Times.

Her passion for cookery prompted Verneil to leave 18 years of studying and practising law behind and become a chef.

“I studied law for 10 years and practised for eight years. I was a member of the bar’s council, specialised in criminal cases, but the more the cases were difficult, the more I wanted to get out of it,” the 38-year-old chef said, noting that cooking was her “way out” when she was under stress while practising law.

“Being a lawyer, I loved it, but it was so hard and I was out of my mind during the night… it was cooking that was so overwhelming to get [my mind] off work.”

Verneil, who is in Jordan along with five other French chefs as part of French Gastronomy Week that concludes on Tuesday, started learning how to cook when she was three years old with her grandmother, who studied household arts.

But passion alone was not enough, so she decided to take cooking classes while practising law, until she took part in and won a cooking tournament in her town.

As part of gastronomy week, organised by Institut Français in cooperation with the Greater Amman Municipality, Le Club de la Table Française and Euro-Toques France, French chefs are serving their best recipes at six of the country’s restaurants.

Verneil said she wants to “take part of Jordan” back with her, so she learnt a falafel recipe from one of the chefs she worked with at the InterContinental Hotel.  

“It’s been two years and I have been doing what I love, thanks to a lot of work and meeting lots of people.”

AMMAN — The consumer price index (CPI), a measurement of inflation, rose by 3.2 per cent during the first quarter of this year compared with the same period of 2013. 

The computed rise of the CPI is the result of an increase in prices of rents, vegetables, cigarettes, tobacco, clothes and shoes, while commodities that recorded a drop in their prices included personal care products, fuel and entertainment services, according to a Department of Statistics report. 

Rents rose by 7.7 per cent, vegetables by 10.7 per cent, cigarettes and tobacco by 10.2 per cent and clothes by 7.1 per cent.  

International creditors have cited the relatively stable inflation rate as a point of strength.

The International Monetary Fund has recently said that year-on-year inflation dropped to just above 3 per cent, while GDP growth increased to about 3 per cent in 2013, with more robust activity in the financial services, telecommunications, trade and construction sectors. 

Another positive indicator is the current account deficit, which is estimated to have improved by over 5 per cent to less than 10 per cent of the GDP, helped by lower energy imports, higher transfers and private receipts. 

AMMAN — Seventy per cent of restoration work to turn Dana into Jordan's first heritage village by the end of the year has been completed.

Reconstruction work on the village began in 2011 as part of a $2 million USAID-funded project, which is being implemented by the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN). 

“A total of 57 properties are being restored as part of the project. Ten properties have already been handed over to their owners, while 20 properties are almost ready, with 90 per cent of the renovation work completed,”
USAID Construction Manager Osama Hassan told The Jordan Times on Sunday.

Once completed, Dana Village will have 107 hotel rooms and a range of tourist facilities, including souvenir shops, studio apartments, laundromats, Internet cafés and barbershops. All of these facilities are designed to offer tourists a glimpse of Jordanian heritage and culture, according to RSCN.

The project was scheduled for completion during the first quarter of this year, Hassan said, explaining that sewage connections and environmental impact assessments have delayed the deadline until the end of this year.

 Built on the ruins of a Byzantine castle, Dana Village is situated on a cliff that overlooks the mountains and valleys of the Dana Biosphere Reserve. The village used to be a bustling community of over 300 families, but its inhabitants left in pursuit of better health, education and employment opportunities, according to RSCN officials.

Located in Tafileh Governorate, 180km southwest of the capital, Dana is Jordan’s largest and most diverse nature reserve with 833 types of vegetation constituting 50 per cent of the total flora in the country.

It houses a range of tourist facilities, including the Rummanah campsite, a guesthouse and an eco-lodge.

Established in 1989, the nature reserve is environmentally important as it is the southernmost remaining forest community of pencil pine. The reserve also contains three rare plants that exist only in Dana and are named after it: Silene danansis, Micromeria danaensis and Rubia danaeansis.

In addition, Dana is a key bird-watching site as it is home to 216 different species of birds, many of which are globally threatened, and 38 mammals, which include the Nubian ibex, Eurasian lynx, hyenas and Blanford’s fox.

AMMAN — The Council of Ministers on Sunday endorsed the preliminary blueprints of the draft by-law governing the decentralisation of the governorate councils and the municipalities draft law, officials announced.

The announcement was made at a joint press conference by Interior Minister Hussein Majali, Minister of Municipal Affairs Walid Masri and Minister of State for Media Affairs and Communications Mohammad Momani, who is also government spokesperson. 

Momani said the Cabinet has translated the Royal vision on decentralised local government into practical steps to enable municipalities and governorate councils to improve their performance and upgrade the quality of their services.  

To carry out the mission, the government has built on previous experiences and studies conducted for this purpose, Momani said, adding that the government is working to meet the legal and constitutional requirements to pave the way for implementing the decentralisation plan, a key component of the reform process aimed at engaging people in policy and decision making related to their areas. 

Majali pointed out that the Council of Ministers formed a specialised committee to handle the task, noting that the decentralisation is a tool to achieve sustainable and comprehensive local development. 

He added that the committee decided that the regulations governing the issue should take the form of a by-law to make it flexible and updatable (without the need to go to Parliament).  According to Majali, the proposed by-law has the power of a law as it is based on Article 120 of the Constitution. 

Masri highlighted the main features of the municipalities bill, noting that the decentralisation by-law will become part and parcel of that law and include more oversight and accountability mechanisms. 

Under the proposed law, municipalities can form coalitions and implement joint projects, he added.

AMMAN — The traffic lights at Amman’s 7th Circle were turned on Sunday.

The two-phase traffic control system prohibits cars coming from the 8th Circle to proceed to the 6th Circle and vice versa, nor from the Airport Road towards Abdullah Ghosheh Street and vice versa, except through the tunnels, according to the Jordan News Agency, Petra.

According to the Greater Amman Municipality, the aim of the measure is “to ease traffic congestion”.

AMMAN – Gaining access to a proper education and finding accommodation are the main challenges orphans face in Jordan, Lubna Asfour, the director general of Saed (Help) Centre, said on Saturday. 

She made the remark at a meeting held by the Saed Centre to mark the anniversary of Arab Orphan Day. 

One of the main difficulties orphans face after turning 18 is finding a place to stay, Asfour told The Jordan Times at the event, attended by representatives of the charity sector and the Ministry of Social Development.

“After conducting research we also found that this is not the only obstacle orphans encounter,” she added. 

The centre was established recently to provide social and economic empowerment to the elderly and orphans, according to Masoon Shuqair, one of its founders.  

She noted that getting a proper education is also a challenge for orphans. 

“Many of them do not go to school or receive a high degree of education. They have lost their motivation to study, so their supervisors should be encouraging them to learn,” Asfour commented. 

She added that some supervisors who work within the charity sector are not qualified enough. 

Shuqair pointed out that orphans need more support when it comes to the labour market.

“It’s difficult for them to find job opportunities. We want to highlight these issues and try to come up with effective solutions,” she added. 

Asfour noted that education is important because it not only provides students with academic skills, but also shapes their character and helps them interact with others. 

“A lack of education means that these orphans will end up working in inappropriate places and increase child labour figures.” 

Asfour also highlighted a lack of financial support for orphan care centres, of which there are around 35 in the Kingdom. 

“Even the Ministry of Social Development is one of the most under-funded ministries,” she commented.