The Special Task Force (STF) has discovered 7,985 kg of waste tea in Ambalangoda police division last evening (10), Police Media Unit told Ceylon Today.
During a raid conducted at Andadola area in Ambalangoda police division, an individual was taken into custody along with a lorry containing a consignment of waste tea. The lorry contained 3,204 kg of waste tea unfit for human consumption, Police said.
The suspect revealed information regarding two warehouses containing waste tea upon questioning, Police Media Unit said. Accordingly a stock of 4781 kg of waste tea, stored in the two warehouses, was taken into police custody along with another suspect.
The suspects, residents of Ambalangoda area, are to be produced before Balapitiya Magistrate today (11) and Ambalangoda Police is conducting further inquiries into the incident.
A vendor covers himself with a shawl amid heaps of radishes at a wholesale vegetable market on a winter morning in Chandigarh, December 18, 2015.REUTERS/AJAY VERMA/FILES
Mon Jan 11, 2016
Indian consumer inflation likely rose slightly in December, due to higher food costs and increases in fuel duties, a Reuters poll found, pushing prices further away from the central bank's medium-term target.
Retail inflation is expected to have risen 5.6 percent annually in the last month of 2015, according to a survey of 33 economists, higher than November's 5.41 percent. The data will be released 1200 GMT on Tuesday.
With inflation running above the RBI's March 2017 target of 5 percent, future interest rate cuts will likely be hard to come by.
The RBI left policy rates unchanged in December. It holds its next policy meeting in early February.
"We think that the window for further easing following the cumulative 125 basis points of rate cuts over the past 12 months has now shut," wrote Shilan Shah, India economist at Capital Economics.
"Further ahead, a potentially large rise in public sector wages would add to the RBI's difficult task in meeting its medium-term inflation targets."
In November, a government panel recommended hiking the wages of about 10 million current and former government employees by nearly 25 percent.
Pay rises could boost economic growth through higher demand but data due on Tuesday will likely show factory activity growth dropped significantly in November.
Indian industrial output was forecast to rise just 2.3 percent annually in November, after a sharp rise in October that came largely due to a low statistical base.
Infrastructure output, which accounts for more than a third of factory activity, shrank 1.3 percent on the year in November, its first fall in seven months.
Infrastructure output was dragged down by lower electricity production and a contraction in cement and steel output.
(Reporting by Siddharth Iyer, polling by Shaloo Srivastava; Editing by Sam Holmes)
File photo of Israeli construction of illegal settlements
Adel Shadeed -Friday, 08 January 2016
Palestinians and Israelis alike have become increasingly convinced that the two-state solution is no longer an option due to Israel’s policies which continue to see settlements built across the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. The latter is supposed to be the capital of the Palestinian state to be established on the 1967 borders.
It is important to consider that the two-state solution was never really a serious option in any case in the minds of Israel’s leadership and public. All that was proposed was a Palestinian Authority with limited security and economic responsibilities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This was planned in order to divest Israel of its legal and moral responsibilities to provide the Palestinians with healthcare, education and other basic necessities as the occupying power. Instead, Israel wanted to occupy and maintain full control, especially the area known as Area C which covers around two-thirds of the West Bank, without having to bear the full cost of the occupation. It also wanted to maintain its control over border crossings, Jerusalem, the airspace, the water sources and other Palestinian resources.
In this context, the statements made by US President Barack Obama a few weeks ago to Benjamin Netanyahu, that it is no longer possible to return to negotiations between the Palestinians and Israelis during what remains of his presidential term, could be understood as Washington abandoning the political process in the Middle East. It has reached an impasse and failed.
The statements made by several US officials and analysts concur with this; the two-state solution has ended, not only as an Israeli option, but also as an international option. A few days ago, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said that the establishment of a Palestinians state is no longer a valid matter and is not beneficial, rather it is harmful in light of the fragmentation of Arab countries that have been established for decades and centuries as well as Daesh’s control of areas within such countries. This matches Israel’s claim that the two-state solution is out of the question in case the Palestinian state falls into the hands of Daesh and other extremist movements.
It is also being mooted that if the two-state solution is dead in the water then the “one state, two nationalities” option may be viable. US Secretary of State John Kerry talked about this recently at the Saban Forum, which could be seen as an admission of the failure of the US efforts towards the two-state solution while simultaneously trying to scare Israel about the one-state solution and provoke optimism amongst the Palestinians. This is important, not least because some Israelis and Palestinians see this as the ideal solution, as it would allow the return of Palestinian refugees to historic Palestine, from the river to the sea, albeit sharing the land with Israel. For some Israelis this would be the realisation of at least part of Greater (“Eretz”) Israel with Palestinian, Arab and Muslim approval.
Israel has thwarted the two-state solution because it conflicts with the Greater Israel project, which means that the Palestinian national movement has also failed to achieve its rump state, despite it being the minimum Palestinian aspiration. Such a state would be too small to be viable and Israel and America would insist that it has no standing army and yet puts Israel’s security interests above its own. With the settlement blocs being preserved and Israeli control over borders, airspace and territorial waters, the Palestinian mini-state would be deprived of important elements of sovereignty.
On top of this, we have witnessed the decline of the status of the Palestinian cause amongst the Arab and international communities for many reasons, as well as the division of the Palestinian national movement and the transformation of the PA into two rivalling authorities that have failed to push Israel to adopt a different approach to the Palestinian issue.
This all leads me to conclude that those who reject the two-state solution will also reject the one-state solution, given Israel’s insistence on defining itself as “the Jewish State” and its current military and economic strength. Its control over newly-discovered natural fields in the Eastern Mediterranean backs this up. Indeed, Israel believes that it has the right to take control over other land in the Middle East, not just historic Palestine.
The Israeli government’s ban on the northern branch of the Islamic Movement within Israel itself, and its passing of racist laws that abolish the individual and collective rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel, is evidence of this. This is happening even though the Palestinians within Israel are not only part of the state but also the indigenous community, unlike the majority of Jewish Israelis whose family roots and ties lie elsewhere.
As such, if both the one-state and two-state solutions are not possible, there is a third option, which will be very attractive to most Israelis. This would see Israel isolating the Palestinian communities in the West Bank and removing them altogether from Jerusalem; the Palestinians would live in fragmented and dismembered islands in a sea of Israeli settlements, and hemmed in by a strong military presence, separation walls and settler-only bypass roads. In effect, this would be the unspoken annexation of the bulk of the occupied Palestinian territories and any notion of a “state of Palestinian” would be consigned to history.
A campaigner for US presidential hopeful Ted Cruz has praised the Israeli accused of killing Palestinian baby Ali Dawabsha.
Cruz, now seeking the Republican nomination in the US presidential race, has declined to distance himself fromVictor Vancier, a convicted bomber fond of making racist comments on the Internet.
In the aftermath of the execution of Saudi Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, the entire Middle East seemed eager to portray his life and death in self-serving fashion. Iran and Shiite movements across the region took on his case as the ultimate proof of the sectarian and unjust nature of the Saudi political system. Pro-Saudi pundits, for their part, have tried to portray the cleric as a pro-Iranian “radical” and “terrorist.” Some went as far as to call him a leader of Hezbollah al-Hejaz, the Saudi Shiite militant group active in the 1980s and 1990s that targeted the Saudi state and ultimately aimed to overthrow the monarchy. This was supposed to legitimize Nimr’s killing, which occurred at the same time as the execution of actual militants from al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports 12 children and a teacher dead after strike in town of Anjara
A classroom in Anjara with airstrike damage. Photograph: Mamun Ebu Omer/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Monday 11 January 2016
At least 12 children have been killed along with their teacher in a Russian airstrike that hit a school in Syria’s Aleppo province, a monitor says.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the strike in the town of Anjara, about nine miles west of the city of Aleppo, also injured at least 20 people, all of them children and teachers.
The group said there had been heavy airstrikes and clashes between government and rebel forces since Sunday in the northern province, which is controlled by a mixture of moderate and Islamist rebels.
Social media footage released by opposition activists showed a classroom with destroyed benches and textbooks lying on the floor stained with blood. The footage could not be independently verified.
The UK-based monitor also reported that three children were killed by rebel rocket fire on a government-held district in Aleppo city.
Control of the city has been divided between government forces in the west and rebel fighters in the east since shortly after fighting began there in mid-2012. Government forces regularly carry out air raids on the east, while rebels fire rockets into the west.
The situation is largely reversed in the countryside surrounding the city, with rebels controlling much of the area west of Aleppo, and the government present to the east.
Russia, a staunch ally of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, began airstrikes in support of the central government in late September. It says it is targeting the Islamic State group and other “terrorists”, but a third of those killed in its strikes have been civilians, according to the Observatory.
The monitor said in late December that Russian airstrikes had killed more than 2,300 people since they began on 30 September, among them 792 civilians.
Moscow has said allegations that its strikes have killed civilians are “absurd”.
More than 260,000 people have been killed in Syria since the conflict began in March 2011 with anti-government protests.
2,000 migrants face eviction from ‘Calais jungle’: Charity Aid groups say that some 2,000 refugees - including over 300 women and 60 kids - will have to be moved within the next three days Young migrants or refugees walk with a stroller on 29 December in a camp in Grande-Synthe, some 30km from Calais (AFP)
Monday 11 January 2016
French authorities may bulldoze a portion of the so-called Calais Jungle which is home to some 2,000 refugees, a charity warned on Monday.
Help Refugees' said that French authorities had given them three days to move the refugees and migrants - including over 300 women and 60 children - adding that the a much larger area than initially thought would have to be cleared.
The charity said that 500 shelters were at risk of demolition and that given the timescale and resources available, aid organisations would only be able to move 10 percent of the shelters in time, calling this a “huge waste of resources, supplies, and time”.
However, the charity then said that negotiations were now happening and that they still hoped that a "sensible resolution" could be found.
"We are devastated to find out we have less than three days to relocate the residents, having been promised much longer by the authorities,” Philli Boyle, Help Refugees' Calais manager said in a statement before the last-minute negotiations were announced.
“Our focus will be on safely moving the women and children, but we will do everything we can to help as many of the people as possible in the limited time we have.
“We had really hoped to be able to move people (many of whom are already so traumatised by their experiences in the countries they have fled from) in a way that would maintain as much dignity as possible, and reduce stress, however this has now been taken out of our hands given the incredibly limited time we now have,” he added.
The announcement came the same day that a new section of the camp, set to house 1,000 people, was opened by aid groups, with people being relocated from tents to containers although the new scheme will only be able to house a fraction of those in need.
There are currently believed to be between 4,000-7,000 migrants in the Calais camp and a further 2,500 in the Grande-Synthe camp in Dunkirk.
On Monday, the government said that they would work to set up suitable shelters for 2,500 migrants - including 120 women and 200 children.
Both French and English authorities have been criticised by aid groups for years for failing to come to grips with the crisis, but they have also come under fire for not doing enough to provide security in the area, with clashes increasingly breaking out with police.
On Sunday night, Xavier Bertrand, the president of the Nord Pas-de-Calais Picardie region, called on the government to send in the army to help the police working around Calais and Dunkirk, home to the largest migrant camps.
He said that the police were tired of being "harassed every night" and needed additional support.
Aid convoys are en route to the besieged Syrian town of Madaya where thousands are trapped and the United Nations says people are reported to have died of starvation. (Reuters)
By Hugh Naylor and Suzan Haidamous-January 11 BEIRUT — A convoy carrying desperately needed food aid reached a besieged Syrian on Monday as part of a U.N-backed agreement to bring relief to people believed to be facing starvation.
Several dozen vehicles bringing food and medical supplies left the Syrian capital, Damascus, for Madaya, a town near the Lebanese border cut off by Syrian forces. The first vehicles rolled into the town hours later.
“We have close to 50 trucks and we are heading to Madaya now,” said Pawel Krzysiek, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, who was traveling with the convoy.
Since July, Madaya residents have faced a punishing blockade by Syrian government forces and allied fighters from Lebanon’s powerful Shiite Hezbollah militia. Images on social media purport to show emaciated residents saying that they have resorted to eating grass and household pets.
Aid groups say about two-dozen people, including children, have died from starvation in Madaya, a pro-rebellion town about 15 miles west of Damascus, but a longer journey by road.
The Britain-based branch of the medical charity Doctors Without Borders said that five people in Madaya, including a 9-year-old boy, died of starvation on Sunday.
The agreement — brokered last week with the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad — comes amid wider efforts to open peace talks to end the nearly five-year conflict in Syria. The U.N.’s World Food Program says the food bound for Madaya will feed about 40,000 residents for a month.
Krzysiek, the ICRC spokesman, said the agreement also involves about 20 trucks containing food and medicine that were dispatched Monday to Fua and Kefraya, pro-government villages in northwestern Syria where residents have faced a siege imposed by anti-Assad rebels.
Another agreement last summer was supposed to end fighting in Madaya and other villages, including Fua and Kefraya. The pact also stipulated food aid to civilians Madaya.
But only one shipment last October had reached them.
Such blockades are common in Syria’s civil war, which has led to more than 250,000 deaths and displaced millions of people.
Critics accuse the Assad government of systematically depriving opponents of food as a weapon of war, and they also criticize the United Nations for regularly attempting to negotiate an end to such sieges rather than unequivocally calling on the Syrian leader to permit unrestricted flow of humanitarian aid.
Rebels forces also face accusation of denying food to besieged areas.
Hugh Naylor is a Beirut-based correspondent for The Post. He has reported from over a dozen countries in the Middle East for such publications as The National, an Abu Dhabi-based newspaper, and The New York Times.
Burmese workers work on a fishing boats at a pier in Prachuabkhirikhant province, southern Thailand. Pic: AP.
British human rights activist Andy Hall. Pic: AP.
11th January 2016
MIGRANT workers in Thailand are discriminated against, scapegoated, vulnerable to exploitation, and human rights abuses. Over the years, Civil Society Organizations (CSO) have played a key role in providing support, empowering communities and documenting abusive practices against migrant workers in Thailand.
‘I SUDDENLY REALISED THAT ALL DAY, EVERY DAY, I FEEL A SENSE OF LOW-LEVEL SADNESS’CREDIT: GETTY/CULTURA RF
Do you remember the last time you woke up feeling happy?
It’s a question Katie* asked herself one morning – and she didn’t like the answer. ‘I suddenly realised that all day, every day, I feel a sense of low-level sadness,’ she says. ‘And what makes it more confusing is that I don’t have anything to feel sad about. I’ve got wonderful friends, a job I like, money to travel. I do yoga, I eat well. I tick all the boxes. Yet when I wake up, I inwardly sigh. “Oh great,” I think, “Another day.”’
Katie is just one of my female friends who say they feel this way. They’re not depressed:symptoms of depression include not just low mood, but feelings of hopelessness, tearfulness, a lack of motivation, not getting enjoyment out of previously enjoyable things, worrying, changes in appetite, and suicidal thoughts. (If you have these symptoms, it’s important to see your GP.)
No – what I’m talking about is the kind of background sadness that’s not all-consuming – but not comfortable either. ‘It’s not the kind of circumstantial sadness that comes with, say, a break-up or a bereavement,’ says Katie. ‘The negative feelings run in parallel with the positives in my life.’
"I learnt to pretend to be upbeat. But underneath my smile I always defaulted to sadness"
Since she was a teenager, another friend, Louise*, has masked her sadness. ‘It’s always been quite easy to hide it from my friends and colleagues,’ she told me. ‘I just don’t talk about it, so on the surface I appear content. I learnt to pretend to be upbeat, especially at work. But underneath my smile I always defaulted to sadness, particularly when I was alone.’
It became harder to hide when she started a new relationship. ‘The more time we spent together, the more he became concerned about how I was feeling. One night, he said, “I’ve noticed you seem really low.” I considered not telling him the truth because I didn’t want to worry him, but I also wanted him to know it wasn’t something he’d done wrong and that sadness was just my default emotion.’
To integrative therapist Hilda Burke, these stories are familiar. ‘I’ve noticed many of my female clients feel this type of ennui – a general feeling of dissatisfaction,’ she says. ‘A lot of these women are successful at work, in good relationships and financially secure, but seem beset by anexistential angst that manifests as sadness.’
Burke says she sees it more in her female clients, but whether this is because women tend to verbalise their emotions more, she doesn’t know. ‘Men will often react by keeping busy to distract themselves from their feelings,’ she says. And unlike depression, you can have ‘high functioning sadness’ and simply carry on as normal, despite feeling slightly sad all the time.
‘It’s possible to hold down a job, a social life and maintain a relationship while still feeling this way,’ says Burke. ‘But if left unchecked, low-level sadness can be harmful to your long-term emotional health because it can drain your emotional resources, which makes the sadness worse.’
So what’s causing this sadness epidemic? It’s a question that was recently posted on Gwyneth Paltrow’s website, Goop. An article titled ‘Why are we all so unhappy?’ cited the 88-year-old ‘happiness guru’ Swami A. Parthasarathy, who noted, ‘As the world has been improved, human beings are not as happy or comfortable as they once were. It’s a paradox. Our ancestors were much happier.’
"As the world has improved, humans are not as happy as they once were. It’s a paradox"
Social media could be partly to blame – a study by Stanford University in the US found the likes of Facebook and Instagram are giving us a false perception of how happy others are. That can make us feel alone in feeling sad when we’re anything but – and that sense of isolation may compound the problem.
An increasing amount of research shows that younger people are particularly susceptible. In a recent TED talk called ‘Older People Are Happier’, Laura Carstensen, psychology professor and director of The Stanford Center on Longevity, said that she had found that people over the age of 65 are ‘happier than middle-aged people and younger people, certainly. Study after study is coming to the same conclusion.’
She added that they’re more accepting of sadness, and don’t dwell as much on the negatives, citing one study where participants of various ages were shown positive and negative images on a computer screen. Those over 65 remembered more positive images than negative ones.
There is evidence too that low-level sadness could be an ingrained personality trait.
‘Some people’s underlying temperament is naturally more melancholic, whereas others are naturally cheerful,’ says Dr Mo Zoha, a consultant psychiatrist at the Nightingale Hospital in London. ‘There is something called the “set point theory” that suggests that after spikes of happiness, some of us revert back to a predisposing mood, which evidence suggests is related to genetic inheritance and early life experiences.’
So if you were born with a bleak disposition, are there ways to boost your happiness?
‘Meditation and mindfulness exercises can help, as can keeping agratitude diary where you write down events or people you’re thankful for,’ says Dr Zoha. According to multiple studies, the best strategies for dealing with sadness are similar to those recommended for stress and anxiety: eat well, get enough sleep, exercise regularly and take time out from technology.
It also helps to know your sadness triggers. ‘Our moods are influenced by the circadian rhythms of our bodies,’ says Professor Dinesh Bhugra of King’s College London and president of the World Psychiatric Association. ‘These are the physical changes that take place in our body over a 24-hour period, responding to the sun rising and setting.’ We’re more likely to feel sleepy, lethargic and even in an emotional slump when it gets dark due to the increase in the production of the hormone melatonin. Some people (particularly sufferers of seasonal affective disorder, who feel sadder during winter) respond to these rhythms more acutely than others.
Is social media to blame for low-level sadness?CREDIT: ALAMY
‘Some of us are also morning people, whereas others are evening people,’ adds Professor Bhugra. ‘It’s helpful to understand your body’s rhythms and identify the best part of the day for you to function well and feel bright.’ If your mood is generally brighter in the evening, try to tweak your schedule accordingly: arrange stressful meetings for afternoons when you feel more capable, or plan a breakfast date with friends if you generally feel down in the morning and need an emotional pick-me-up.
In the end, partly due to her partner’s concern, my friend Laura decided to embark on a course ofcognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), where she was taught ways to ‘retrain’ her mood and ‘switch off’ her sadness.
‘I learned to make a list of everything that’s making me feel particularly sad that day, then I break down those thoughts and feelings into bite-size portions,’ she says. ‘Once you’ve done this, you often remember there’s nothing to feel sad about.’
So is she cured? ‘Oh no,’ she says. ‘Low-level sadness is still very much a part of who I am. But I’ve learnt to accept and manage it.’
*Names have been changed
Have you found ways of dealing with low-level sadness? Tell us your happiness strategies at stella@telegraph.co.uk
"Empiric medicine – medicine from plants – has been with us throughout history and hemp is the queen of all empiric healers." ~Rick Simpson
Rick Simpson with the hemp oil he produces for the ill. Photo by Christian Laurette
Jan-21-2010
(EUROPE) - Rick Simpson's name is synonymous with healing hemp oil. Here he addresses many questions on how to produce and use the healing cannabis product, standing by the oil that has cost him his freedom to return to Canada.
When people are stricken with diseases like cancer, multiple sclerosis, AIDS and many others, they are afraid and do not know what to believe. The best thing anyone in this position can do is to educate themselves about their condition.
A song posted on the You Tube comparing President Maithripala Sirisena with ancient kings of Pollonnaruwa gave rise to a storm of social-media protests and was removed within hours. Parliamentarian Hirunika Premachandra was arrested for her alleged involvement in the Kollonnawa abduction.
The massacre of nine civilians by Sri Lankan police at the fourth World Tamil Research Conference in 1974 was remembered in Jaffna on Sunday.
10 January 2016
Three students, a teacher and a doctor were among those killed.
Residents and politicians took part in the event, including the head of the Ilankai Thamizh Arasu Katchi (ITAK), Mavai Senathirajah, and the Northern Provincial Council members C V K Sivagnanam, M K Shivajilingham and P Kajatheepan.
File photo of Israeli construction of illegal settlements
