Kili Maharaja’s Illegal Grab Of State Land Worth Half A Billion Rupees?

By Muhammed Fazl –May 7, 2015

Muhammed Fazl

“You can never reach the Promised Land. You can march towards it” – James Callaghan

Be it Palestine or a prime State land at Colombo Sri Lanka, impossible it should be made to claim ownership for criminals when lands are acquired illegally. Conducting investigations in to the disputed block of land at Bank of Ceylon Mawatha (right opposite WTC), many instances of meticulously planned and illegally occupied State and private lands have come to light and that which resulted in political henchmen and criminals raking in billions in the last 30 years. While I intend exposing famous personalities for obtaining land and property illegally and by using fraudulent documents in the near future, it did come as a surprise when a prominent and supposedly a ‘conscientious’ media empire happened to be involved possibly in one of the biggest illegal land grabs in the recent history of Sri Lanka.

Elusive and highly manipulative, though establishing himself as a successful businessman, it is indeed pathetic of Mr. Kili Maharaja (KM) and his company, Capital Maharaja Organization Limited (CMOL) to ‘move mountains’ in staking a claim for a prime State property at #19, Bank of Ceylon Mawatha, Fort Colombo, and over which I have reasonable grounds to believe that it should be vested back with the Urban Development Authority (UDA) as rightful owners.

Having met with stiff resistance when in search of information on the land in question valued at over Rs. 10,000,000/- per perch, the five million Dollar question is how was it possible for a prime State land to end up in the hands of a politically powerful figure (KM) after it was given to a little-known Sri Jaya Hotels Limited (SJHL) 26 years ago?

When this matter surfaced a month and half ago when officials from CMOL attempted to fence the property in question, watching news on TV at home, my attention to this matter was drawn only when UDA officials sprang to action within 24 hours in defending CMOL’s right of ownership. In my eyes, this was quite unusual for a lethargic government department in Sri Lanka, especially when the value of the land is about half a billion Rupees. The following describes the turn of events;

Mr. Kili Maharaja

1 – Visited the MTV Head Office on March 31, 2015 and met Mr. Shameer Rasoolden who asked me to email him a formal request along with my credentials. Other than my GCE O/L qualifications and not having any other significant paper qualifications as such, I e-mailed him links to my Colombo Telegraph online articlesand the links to two interviews I have done with Mr. Sumal Perera of Access International and with DIG Ravi Waidyalankara, Director FCID along with the formal request.

2 – Mr. Chevaan Daniel, the highly respected Group Director of CMOL that he is, responds on April 6, 2015 mentioning his willingness to furnish the following documents but NOT the copy of the deed,

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‘I challenge anyone to prove, even ready to quit’-Rishad

May 7, 2015 

Minister Rishad Bathiudeen today (7) issued an open challenge to anyone who could prove that he “re-settled any Pakistani nationals within the Northern Province” -and vowed that if proven, he is ready to call it quits immediately. 

“Today I challenge anyone who could prove that I re-settled any Pakistani nationals or outsiders within the Northern Province-and if proven, I am ready resign from my portfolio immediately,” Bathiudeen.

Minister Bathiudeen was addressing a special media briefing held at the Ministry of Industry and Commerce against the apparent vilification campaign taking shape in certain media segments targeting him that, among others, alleged that Muslim IDP resettlements led by him are damaging the Wilpattu Forest Reserve in Northern Province.    

“During the past few weeks, some television and the news media have negatively reported on continued and illegal Muslim resettlements in the Marichchikatti Grama Seva division which is outside the Wilpattu National Park. One privately owned media channel, during the last seven days, alleged that I have been destroying the Wilpattu jungle areas and also mentioned that I have been working to create an exclusive Zone to settle Pakistani nationalities and people from other Districts in this zone. These are campaigns of vilification” said Minister Bathiudeen. 

“I am in total support of re-settling whoever was displaced in North-Sinhalese, Tamils or Muslims. I also thank the former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, Minister Basil Rajapaksa, the Commanders of tri-forces, the forces themselves as well as all other people for the support and commitment given to re-settle in the aftermath of end of war in 2009,” the Minister added.

After swindling tsunami money, Tiran swindles welfare money too!

Thursday, 07 May 2015

The owner of Mawbima newspapers, who is found to have swindled millions of rupees received as tsunami relief money in 2004, has also swindled the five per cent deducted from their salaries for welfare purposes, says sources at the newspaper.

The money reduced from employees’ salaries should be credited to a welfare account run by the newspaper company. But, for several years, that had not been done. As a result, the welfare activities of the employees had to be suspended.

When employees questioned about the fate of the money deducted from their salaries, the new financial director of the company, who is the son of Tiran, has blamed it on his predecessor Dushantha Basnayake. Tiran’s son is saying that Dushantha was removed due to his weak management. When the employees inquired from the former financial director, they were told, “Tiran did not allow me to credit the money deducted from you to the welfare account. He used if for other purposes.”

The ethanol business

May 6, 2015, 12:00 pm 

We read that massive volumes of concentrated ethanol have been detected from time to time by Customs and Excise authorities. It is suspected that equally huge consignments have passed through undetected. Similarly, large detections of distilled Kasippu, related equipment and raw materials are made on a virtually daily basis.

For what lawful purposes is ethanol imported? The perfumery and pharmaceutical industries come to mind. However, their requirements are probably minuscule in comparison to the amounts evidently coming in. The attention should immediately shift to the chain of officials colluding in the required authorizations and supervision. They should be detected and duly punished. Industrial alcohol arrives at such strengths that a three or four-fold dilution will yield a mix as potable and potent as gin or whiskey. So lucrative is this illegal business.

The intoxicating ingredient in kasippu is also ethanol. While the alleged barbed wire, geckos and rats are not amenable to distillation, unfortunately the harmful methanol and urea are potential co-distillates.

All alcoholic beverages start as carbohydrates - wheat, barley, rice, sugar cane, dates, potato and so on. Considerable ingenuity enters into illicit alcohol production. We can turn this curse into an asset. There is a good case for revisiting archaic excise regulations that make alcohol production illicit. This was possibly introduced mainly for fiscal reasons - to collect excise duties. This was little different from making salt production from sea water illegal. Rather than endless efforts to raid illicit stills, it would be much more prudent to regularize this activity with proper controls and revenue collection procedures.

It is claimed by some that some kasippu is far more acceptable and innocuous than the official brews. In fact, some of the latter are blends

containing industrial ethanol. Ideally, legalised production should be accompanied by proper quality control to exclude harmful components such as methanol, aldehydes and other obnoxious impurities and a fair excise tax be levied. The latter could be plowed back into improving the production processes and enhancing supervision.

Experience has shown that enforced prohibition and unintelligent controls only lead to abuse. One may also remember that excess or non-potable rejections could still be diverted to "gasohol" as alternative or supplementary fuel. A basic fact is that in human history, fermentation probably pre-dated agriculture. This rich experience and basic productive enterprise need not and will never, disappear.

Dr U.Pethiyagoda.

France launches criminal inquiry into alleged sex abuse by UN soldiers

Prosecutors announce investigation into claims French soldiers raped children on peacekeeping operation in Central African Republic

 A French soldier with the UN’s Operation Sangaris in Bangui, Central African Republic, last year. Photograph: Marco Longari/AFP/Getty Images

Kim Willsher in Paris andSandra Laville in London-Thursday 7 May 2015

French prosecutors have ordered a criminal investigation into allegations that French peacekeeping soldiers raped children and demanded sex for food in theCentral African Republic.

The decision follows revelations in the Guardian more than a week ago that a senior United Nations official had been suspended for leaking details of the alleged abuse to the French government.

The Paris prosecutor’s office said on Thursday it had decided to launch criminal proceedings after receiving a reply to its request for information from the UN about the accusations of sexual abuse by French soldiers serving with the peacekeeping operation Sangaris.

It said the investigation concerned “the rape of minors under 15 years old by persons who had abused the authority conferred upon them by their roles, and complicity in this crime”.

“Investigations will now continue under the authority of an instructing magistrate in order to get to the truth of the accusations,” it declared.

France has come under increasing pressure and criticism over its apparent failure to act quickly to identify and prosecute the suspected soldiers, and claims it has been sitting on the leaked UN report detailing the alleged sexual abuse.

The UN has been criticised for taking action against Anders Kompass, the official who leaked the report to the French – sources say because he knew the UN would not take action.

Kompass, director of field operations, was suspended last month and faces an internal disciplinary disciplinary hearing for breaching UN protocols.

On Wednesday an appeal tribunal found that the suspension of Kompass was unlawful and ordered his reinstatement while an internal management review continues.

His leak led the French to start a preliminary investigation in Paris in July last year, but no action appeared to have been taken until the scandal broke last week.

In its defence, the French prosecutor’s office on Thursday accused the UN of delaying the preliminary investigation by twice rejecting French efforts to hear from the UN coordinator who wrote the abuse report, despite her own willingness to do so in Paris.

“The UN hierarchy refused this questioning, indicating that the functionary benefited from immunity that had to be lifted before any questioning,” the prosecutor’s office said.

It also cited a total of more than six months of delays in French investigators’ efforts to get answers from the author, which finally resulted in written responses received on 29 April.

On Wednesday, the CAR justice minister, Aristide Sokambi, said his country was also launching legal action against the French military suspects.

“It’s not [operation] Sangaris. It’s not the whole of France. It’s individuals, it’s soldiers and it’s against them that we will act,” Sokambi said.

“I deplore the fact that we haven’t been joined about this investigation when we have cooperation agreements with France. So I’ve instructed the public prosecutor to open an inquiry and then try to collect evidence already available to the French,” Sokambi added, saying the allegations were “extremely serious”.

The French ministry of defence said it had collected “evidence from Central African Republic children accusing French soldiers of Operation Sangaris of sexual abuse”.

The statements from abused children were taken by UN staff and “outline the facts committed against around 10 children at the M’Poko airport area between December 2013 and June 2014”, the statement said.

About 14 French soldiers are under investigation, but very few have been identified, a legal source told Le Figaro newspaper.

Kompass was suspended on full pay on 17 April for having passed the confidential report detailing the alleged attacks on young boys to France in July last year. France reportedly wrote to Kompass thanking him for reporting the alleged abuse.

France intervened in the Central African Republic in December 2013 after a rebel group overthrew President François Bozize, sparking violence between Muslim- and Christian-led militias.

Hundreds of thousands of civilians were displaced by the fighting and many took refuge in makeshift camps, one of them near the airport at the CAR capital of Bangui. This is where French troops were stationed and the alleged abuse took place. As well as the 14 French soldiers, five peacekeepers from Chad and Equatorial Guinea are accused of having demanded sex acts from hungry children in return for food.

The French president, François Hollande, has said his country will act: “If some soldiers behaved badly, I will be merciless. If this information is confirmed, there will be exemplary punishment.”

The French defence minister, Jean-Yves le Drian, said the army had carried out an internal investigation but few of the alleged perpetrators had been identified. He appealed for the soldiers involved to hand themselves in.

Netanyahu’s New Government Could Be Messy, Short-Lived, and Likely to Anger the U.S.

BY YOCHI DREAZEN, SIOBHÁN O'GRADY-MAY 6, 2015

Alast-minute deal with the far-right Jewish Home party allowed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to cobble together a coalition government Wednesday, just hours before a midnight deadline that could have lost him his prime ministership.

Netanyahu, who narrowly won the Israeli election for the Likud party nearly two months ago, reportedly sealed the deal with just two hours to spare. The new government is likely to be one of the shakiest in recent Israeli history, with Netanyahu having just the bare 61 seats needed to form a majority in the Knesset. With lawmakers deeply divided over issues ranging from Iran to the country’s growing income inequality, Netanyahu will almost certainly have a hard time keeping his fractious coalition intact.

The sharply right-wing nature of the coalition also means that Netanyahu is likely to maintain his staunch opposition to the Obama administration’s ongoing nuclear talks with Iran and the White House’s stated desire for the creation of a Palestinian state. That, in turn, means that the tense personal relationship between Netanyahu and President Barack Obama — already so bad that ties between the two allies have plunged to their lowest point in decades — won’t improve anytime soon and could easily get even worse.

The six-week negotiating process was complicated by rivaling coalition parties vying for top spots in Netanyahu’s Cabinet — and by the combative prime minister’s tense relationships with the leaders of the country’s other right-leaning and far-right parties.

Earlier this week, with Wednesday’s deadline looming, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, a long-time ally of Netanyahu’s, announced he would resign his post and take his party into the opposition. Lieberman accusedNetanyahu of failing to take a hard enough line with the Hamas militants who control the Gaza Strip and said he couldn’t be part of a government that “has no intention to build housing, neither in major settlement blocks nor in Jerusalem.”

This put the pressure on Netanyahu, whose Likud Party took 30 seats in the country’s March election. The Israeli leader secured an additional 23 seats from ultra-orthodox parties and one led by a breakaway member of Likud.

Still short eight seats as of Wednesday morning, Netanyahu had no choice but to turn to the Jewish Home Party and its leader, Naftali Bennett, whose relationship with the Israeli premier is almost as bad as that of Netanyahu and Lieberman.

Bennett, sensing that he had his longtime rival over a barrel, demanded the foreign ministry for himself and the justice ministry for his ally Ayelet Shaked, who is deeply controversial because of past statements calling for violence against Palestinian civilians.

Before the clock struck midnight, a deal between the two was reached, and Netanyahu called President Reuven Rivlin, as required by law, to announce his coalition government was formed. According to reports in the Israeli media, Bennett’s party was given the education ministry, which he will reportedly run, as well as both the justice ministry and the Knesset committee that oversees Israel’s judicial system. In a move certain to be viewed with dismay at the White House, Bennett’s party will also gain control of the wing of the government charged with running Israeli-held portions of the West Bank. Shaked, meanwhile, will reportedly end up as the country’s next justice minister.

Netanyahu, who was facing the end of his long career in politics, now lives to fight another day at the helm of a new coalition. How long that government lasts — and how much further away from Obama it pushes Netanyahu — remains to be seen.

Ilia Yefimovich/Getty Images

German strikes put unions and politicians at loggerheads

THURSDAY 07 MAY 2015

Once lauded as a model of employee-worker relations, Germany is being rocked by a series of strikes, and politicians are now moving to curb the legal powers of trade unions.

THURSDAY 07 MAY 2015

Earlier this week German train drivers began a walkout that has left transport and supply chains in the country in chaos. The six-day strike is one of the longest in its national rail history and eighth walkout in the last 10 months.

A striking problem

It comes at a cost of "several hundreds of millions of euros," according to The Federation of German Industry (BDI) whose spokesman said the strikes were injecting "poison" into the country's highly developed economy.

With the rail system down, other industries are affected.

The steel, chemicals and car supply lines are in backlog, while there are even reports of cash points running dry with courier workers in Berlin also striking.

These walkouts have coincided with pilot strikes at Germany's flagship airline Lufthansa and a high profile two-year wage battle between the Verdi union and online retailer Amazon.

Under strain: working relations

So what is going on?

For years Germany's economy has been the envy of Europe. So-called "works councils" have been the staple of what has largely been a fruitful relationship between workers and employers.

Under this system, labour representatives receive half of the seats on the supervisory boards of big companies. When management debates big strategic decisions, unions have a say. As a result fractious disputes have usually been resolved without too much hassle. Nowhere was the success of this more celebrated than during the banking crisis of 2008.

The "works council" system allowed the two sides to come together quickly and thrash out a deal that included cuts in working hours, and cuts in pay - across the board. As a result unemployment rose only fractionally.

But in recent years things - as parts of the European and global economy have recovered - things have been changing. Industrial unrest in Germany has been growing and the system once designed as a safeguarding mechanism has been used as a negotiating tool.

The current German structural system is geared to prevent a company from taking radical decisions that may be necessary to preserve competitiveness. So as companies move to try and bring about reforms, they are running into objections, with workers able to mobilise unions quickly.

Hitting back

But all this could be about to change.

Later this year Angela Merkel's government is expected to pass legislation that will curb the influence of niche unions.

Under a law that comes into force in July, companies will be able to limit wage negotiations to the union with only the biggest group of employees. Courts would be able to rule strikes by smaller unions without bargaining power illegal.

"Striking is a right in Germany. Nevertheless I believe that these strikes are creating a serious burden for many people and many companies," Ms Merkel said at a news conference this week. "Therefore everything must be done to find a solution."

Should that not be happen, expect this summer to be when the government finally steps in.

Emergency funds for Nepal quake slow to come in, says UN

Nepalese people pose for picture in front of the collapsed nine-storey Dharara tower during a candlelight vigil to pay tribute to the earthquake victims after the April 25 earthquake at Kathmandu May 7, 2015.

KATHMANDU | BY KRISTA MAHR-Thu May 7, 2015 

(Reuters) - Only a fraction of the emergency funds the United Nations has requested for victims of Nepal's earthquake have come in, U.N. officials said on Thursday, as crises around the world put unprecedented demands on international donors.

Of the $415 million requested by the U.N. and its partners last week, just $22.4 million has been provided.

"It's a poor response," Orla Fagan, spokeswoman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told Reuters on Thursday.

Fagan attributed the shortage to "donor fatigue," citing more than a dozen other long-running international crises, such as the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, which are also making demands on donor nations.

The 7.8 earthquake that struck northwest of Nepal's capital Kathmandu on April 25 has killed at least 7,759 people, injured over 16,000, and destroyed more than 300,000 homes.

Nearly two weeks after the quake, aid agencies are still trying to identify remote areas that have not received help, with pressure building to reach people before the annual monsoon arrives in the next few weeks.

Relief supplies are in short supply around the country, the U.N. said, despite the logjam of aid that built up last week at the nation's only international airport in Kathmandu.

The U.N.'s "flash appeal" for emergency funds is designed to respond to the first three months after the disaster, and includes requests for funding for food, health, and shelter.

"There are so many other global emergencies on now ... There is a lot of demand for the humanitarian dollar," said Rick Brennan, emergency director of the World Heath Organization. The U.N. appeal included a request of $75 million for health relief.

Globally, donors have been generous with their funding in the large number of humanitarian crises, said Ertharin Cousin, executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme.

"We raised more money than we have ever raised before last year, but we have more need," Cousin told Reuters last week.

"This is truly unprecedented, and the challenge is we don't see an end to it in sight."

(Additional reporting by Frank Jack Daniel, Ross Adkin and Gopal Sharma in Kathmandu; editing by Andrew Roche)

New Hope for Children in Ongoing Central African Republic Conflict

BY SIOBHÁN O'GRADY-MAY 6, 2015

Amid reports that more than 700 women and children were freed from Boko Haram in recent weeks, the United Nations has more good news from a forgotten conflict in nearby Central African Republic (CAR). Eight opposing militias there have signed a deal to release all children affiliated with the groups.

The deal, signed Tuesday during an ongoing weeklong reconciliation conference in the capital city of Bangui, offers amnesty and medical treatment to the some 10,000 children who were conscripted against their will to fight for the groups or kept hostage as sex slaves and menial laborers.

UNICEF has labeled CAR as one of the worst places in the world for children to live. The role of children in the conflict re-emerged last week after a whistleblower from the U.N. accused French peacekeepers stationed there of sexually abusing children they were supposed to protect. There are currently 8,500 U.N. peacekeepers stationed in CAR.

The new deal marks a major step toward peace in the war-ravaged country, where thousands of people have been killed since March 2013, when then-President François Bozizé was ousted by Islamist Seleka rebels.

The coup led to sectarian violence, largely unprecedented in the former French colony, which gained independence in 1960.

After Seleka-backed Michel Djotodia took power, the anti-Balaka, composed of Christian militia groups, sought revenge, and violence between the Muslim and Christian populations there spiraled out of control. Splinter groups soon emerged, and the conflict has forced more than 1 million people from their homes. Djotodia resigned in January 2014, and nonpartisan Catherine Samba-Panza became the interim president.

Last September, the U.N. took over the peacekeeping mission in CAR, and the United States reopened its embassy in Bangui. Despite some international intervention, the fighting has continued. This week’s reconciliation talks are intended to draft a new constitution for the country and prepare for upcoming national elections, which could be difficult to organize if the conflict is not resolved.

But if eight of the country’s rebel groups have already agreed to release thousands of children after only two days, the country’s population of 4.5 million has reason to hope progress could be near.

Photo credit: Evan Schneider/UN Photo via Getty Images

NSA program on phone records is illegal, court says

The National Security Agency has collected millions of Americans’ phone records under a program the Obama administration has said was authorized by Congress. (Patrick Semansky/Associated Press)

By Ellen Nakashima-May 7 

A federal appeals court on Thursday ruled that the National Security Agency’s collection of millions of Americans’ phone records violates the Patriot Act, the first appeals court to weigh in on a controversial surveillance program that has divided Congress and ignited a national debate over the proper scope of the government’s spy powers.

The NSA’s gathering of phone records for counterterrorism purposes — launched after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — was revealed by former agency contractor Edward Snowden in June 2013. The revelation sparked outrage but also steadfast assertions by the Obama administration that the program was authorized by statute and deemed legal by a series of federal surveillance court judges.

But the judicial rulings had taken place in secret, until the Snowden leaks forced disclosure of once-classified opinions.

In its decision, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, based in New York, determined that the government stretched the meaning of the statute to enable the vast collection of Americans’ data from U.S. phone companies on a daily basis without a warrant. The NSA is collecting “metadata” — or records of times, dates and durations of calls — but not call content.

[The opinion from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit]

“The government takes the position that the metadata collected — a vast amount of which does not contain directly ‘relevant’ information, as the government concedes — are nevertheless ‘relevant’ because they may allow the NSA, at some unknown time in the future, utilizing its ability to sift through the trove of irrelevant data it has collected up to that point, to identify information that is relevant,” the court said.

“We agree with appellants that such an expansive concept of ‘relevance’ is unprecedented and unwarranted.”

The 97-page ruling comes as Congress faces a June 1 deadline to reauthorize the statute that underpins the NSA program or let it lapse. A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers in the House and Senate is seeking to renew the statute with modifications that supporters say will enable the NSA to get access to the records it needs while protecting Americans’ privacy.

The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), and the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Richard Burr (R-N.C.), introduced a bill to maintain the program.

Administration officials have indicated that they are likely to endorse the bipartisan reform legislation, which is called the USA Patriot Act. But the ACLU and a coalition of groups on the left and the right are pushing to let the statute, which is known as Section 215 of the Patriot Act, simply lapse.

“The appeals court’s careful ruling should end any debate about whether the NSA’s phone-records program is lawful,” said Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director. “The ruling has broader significance as well, because the same defective legal theory that underlies the call-records program underlies many of the NSA’s other mass-surveillance programs. The ruling warrants a reconsideration of all of those programs.”

White House officials on Thursday said they were evaluating the decision and declined further comment.

“The president has been clear that he believes we should end the Section 215 bulk telephony metadata program as it currently exists by creating an alternative mechanism to preserve the program’s essential capabilities without the government holding the bulk data,” said Edward Price, a National Security Council spokesman. “We continue to work closely with members of Congress from both parties to do just that, and we have been encouraged by good progress on bipartisan, bicameral legislation that would implement these important reforms.”

The issue is one that has split lower courts, making it more likely, some analysts say, that it will be taken up by the Supreme Court. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in December 2013 held that the program was probably unconstitutional. The appeals court for the District has not yet ruled on that appeal.

Michael Sussmann, a former Justice Department official who is now a partner at Perkins Coie practicing surveillance law, called Thursday’s ruling “sweeping and unambiguous.”

“Only the Supreme Court will be able to bring harmony to these polar opposite views of the program and the law,” he said.

Ellen Nakashima is a national security reporter for The Washington Post. She focuses on issues relating to intelligence, technology and civil liberties.

Bangkok and New York fought a media war with no winner

By Justin Heifetz-May 07, 2015

More than three weeks hav e passed since 2,774 of my words were published in the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), my attempt at finally sharing the painful experience of being stifled by editors during a rocky stint at the Bangkok Post.

The goal of the story was seizing an opportunity to push back against the Thai media system, where the threat of defamation continues to loom menacingly for reporters. Ironically — by writing this piece on it — I’d relive my trauma all over again, instead of fighting a successful battle against the Thai media for biased reporting.

Now in Beijing, I find myself wondering what comes next following the very public spat. The reality is that I didn’t even make a dent in improving the Thai media system.

I left Thailand just over a year ago, after my reporting led to a dangerous brush with defaming the navy in February 2014. Contrary to my gut, I decided to endure the resulting friction and try to wait it out. Nothing good came of hoping for resolution. It marked the start of some 60 days of insomnia that ultimately led to a breakdown. All I accomplished were five pieces, the result of my last efforts reporting for the Post on the Sunday edition’s investigative news section.

I landed back in America in early April last year. On a whim, I went to Washington, D.C., because a couple of my best friends lived there. I wrote pharmaceutical news and then eventually got a job with Gallup. It was my first time back stateside since graduating college.

In March this year, while preparing for a move to China, I finally found my voice to tell the story of what happened in Thailand. It would be a narrative of how I irritated the wrong rear admiral while reporting a story for a newspaper known for employing foreign reporters, then recycling them when they inevitably stepped on a land mine.

I made a stupid mistake, though. In my recounting, some facts — completely irrelevant to the thrust of the story — were dead wrong. I said that the Post was the largest-circulating English daily in Southeast Asia. It is not. I was also wrong that all defamation charges in Thailand are treated as criminal, because some — in rare instances — are civil.

The Post wrote a scathing rebuttal to my piece, and used these errors to allege that I fabricated nearly everything. I had to subsequently prove where I was and why I had been there.

After recounting myriad situations and furnishing as much material proof as I had, the story finally stuck — granted, with factual errors.

In this situation, I don’t see any winners. I accused the Post of perpetuating a cycle of silence through fear. It accused me of being a bad reporter.

Either way, we’re at loggerheads and that doesn’t catalyze change.

And I ask again, what comes next? My biggest worry is that the piece I wrote simply caused temporary upset — stomachs turning, eyes rolling. I can’t answer this question, now. I hope that self-discovery comes with age; I hope that every barb makes thicker skin.

After the CJR’s investigation, it became abundantly clear that it is — unequivocally — against Thai law to hire non-nationals as editors. The Post hasn’t answered why it hired me with paperwork for the Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs stating I would be a “sub-editor” on the “General News Desk”, but allowed me to be the main English reporter for the Sunday.

In my response to the Post’s allegations, I asked about employee retention on the Sunday. Two other reporters, both Thai, left the section at about the same time I did. Out of the original reporting team I began with, only one remains.

Yet, there has been no answer to the staffing tumult on the Sunday. It is woefully unclear as to whether it’s a coincidence — or, if it’s because the section pushes the envelope with investigative news.

A new Freedom House report released at the end of April showed that Thailand, along with Libya, had the biggest press freedom decline in 2014 – far eclipsing South Sudan and Egypt.

But here, in Beijing, I’m learning to let it go. This is the pain and detachment that comes with surrender. And while I come to grips with the fact I couldn’t make change – a salvo intercepted at the very last second – I can only hope someone else learns from my mistakes, and can.

Justin Heifetz is a Beijing-based journalist.