Yoshitha Rajapaksa, an officer of the Sri Lanka Navy, is to be summoned before a military court. That is in connection with the abuse of his position in violation of the navy act for his personal needs.
The main accusation is his having held the position of chairman of a private company, Carlton Sports Network, while being a military officer, which is against military law, lawyers are of the view.
Also, he had undertaken many foreign tours, without obtaining written permission from the navy. That is the other accusation against him. Not even a navy commander has enjoyed such privileges. An investigation is to be carried out as to how Yoshitha had gone overseas nearly 30 times, at a time when not even top officers had undertaken foreign trips without written permission.
If found guilty before a military court, Yoshitha will be punished, reports say.
Trial begins in 30-year-old Devananda case 2016-01-19 The trial in the nearly three decades-old Kodambakkam shoot-out case, in which former Sri Lankan minister Douglas Devananda is the prime accused, commenced with the examination of a witness in Chennai on Monday. The trial was commenced by Additional Public Prosecutor Prabhavathi before IV Additional Sessions Judge M Shanthi, the New Indian Express reported today. Later, the judge adjourned the matter till February 1 for further action. Members of the then EPRLF, headed by Devananda, resorted to a shoot-out in Choolaimedu in 1986 and a local by name Thirunavukkarasu was killed in the cross-fire. Devananda and nine others were arrested and released on bail. But, they absconded and non-bailable arrest warrants (NBW) were issued against them. In the meanwhile, Devananda became a minister in the Mahinda Rajapaksa government and was not arrested though he had made official visits to India a couple of occasions. The NBW pending against him was also withdrawn.
The case was split into two, one against the available accused Devananda and the other against the absconding ones, which is yet to take shape.
How are Palestinians supposed to speak with their gullets compressed by the gun butts of the Israeli army? Mamoun WazwazAPA images
Zionists are big on dialogue. Nary does a criticism of Israel occur without an appeal to dialogue in return.
Dialogue is especially popular on campus, where Zionist groups respond to Palestinian human rights activism by vigorously requesting dialogue.
Those with whom they request dialogue rightly recognize the offer as an implicit threat. To decline means facing what comes next: all the repression Sheldon Adelson’s casino money can buy.
It’s a neat rhetorical strategy. The party holding the vast majority of power can position themselves as an eager moppet who merely wants to talk even though they support a settler-colonial regime with nuclear weapons, while the party pursuing justice – against the predilections of administrators, billionaires and politicians – immediately becomes obstinate for vague reasons of culture or religion.
Could it be possible that Zionists don’t want “dialogue” in the sense of a frank and open conversation? Does this version of dialogue coerce others into moderating their commitment to Palestine’s liberation in service of the colonizer’s security?
It’s likely the case, but I can never get Zionists to answer those questions. They don’t really like dialogue unless it’s unidirectional.
Don’t get me wrong; I understand their hesitation. Cheering oppression is difficult without pretending it’s godly or noble. That’s why all colonizers regularly suffer existential angst.
Talking Palestinians to death
I realize I’m being a bit abstruse. Folks with impressive titles are always advising Arabs to be more practical. I don’t want to disappoint them, so I’ll give it a try.
Criticizing Israel and receiving in response a farrago of disapproval for eschewing dialogue produces terrific confusion.
Are we supposed to let somebody vet our criticism before airing it? Is there a special council of dialogic savants to approve the tone and content of anything related to Israel?
How, in any case, are Palestinians supposed to speak with their gullets compressed by the gun butts of the Israeli army?
The confusion doesn’t end here. In these dialogues, what exactly do we discuss? There hasn’t been any misunderstanding.
Zionists stole Palestine from its original inhabitants. Israel doesn’t allow the people it displaced to return. It brutalizes those who remain. It’s not like we have to figure out what the hell went wrong.
I’m not one of those bad Arabs, though, so I welcome calls to dialogue no matter how much they befuddle me. In fact, I’m going to assist our uninvited interlocutors by providing them a simple guide to dialoguing with Palestinians.
This guide is my gift to those who insist on dialogue as an alternative to justice. May they ever use it wisely.
Issue: Right of return
Visit any refugee camp in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank or Gaza Strip, where you’ll encounter countless Palestinians eager to chat. Explain that they must remain in overcrowded quasi-polities built of cinder block and barbed wire, in exile from their ancestral land, for the simple reason that they’re not Jewish.
Issue: Boycott, divestment and sanctions
Find a Palestinian you think is violent (which is to say, any Palestinian). Tell her she needs to commit to nonviolence. After she accepts your demand, explain that it doesn’t count because she chose the wrong kind of nonviolence.
Issue: One-state/Two-state Solution
This one is tricky. Palestinians have lately shifted in considerable numbers from the old model of colonial partition to secular binationalism.
No matter how adamantly Palestinians insist they’re willing to coexist with Israeli Jews, based on free elections and equal civic participation, proclaim that they’re too primitive to understand how democracy works.
Issue: Terrorism
Find one of the thousands of Palestinians who has lost a loved one because of Israeli bombs or chemical weapons, dropped in the service of maintaining a ruthless colonial apparatus, and point out that every act of violence in Israel’s history has been reluctant and defensive. (Alternate strategy: mindlessly repeat “terrorism,” devoid of context or analysis, until Palestinians express any sort of frustration, at which point you can announce that your thesis has been validated.)
Issue: Gaza’s 551 lost children
You want to be sensitive here. Israel’s Operation Protective Edge in 2014 showed that while many Americans can ignore or tolerate the sight of dead Arab adults, they’re apt to sympathize with suffering Arab children.
But dialogue demands integrity, right? You’re convinced that Palestinian depravity forced Israel to slaughter those kids.
On to Gaza you must travel, then, and share your benighted outlook with hundreds of bereaved mothers and fathers. Grieving Western parents don’t like being blamed for the death of their own children, but Palestinians are obviously less sensitive.
Issue: Settlers/settlements
Like any self-respecting denizen of modernity, you hate the settlers. Palestinians hate them, too. Not much to talk about, right? Supervising criticism of Israel is a full-time job, however, an occupation, if you will.
And Palestinians have the annoying habit of criticizing pre-1967 settlers, whom you adore.
The best way to dialogue about this issue is to tell Palestinians that Israel must be preserved as an ethnocracy in which non-Jews are legally dispossessed because a few thousand ideologues from the American suburbs need a spare country to fulfill their Orientalist fantasies.
Issue: Safe spaces on campus
Find the many professors and students who have been fired, criminalized or otherwise punished for criticizing Israel, and declare that their suffering, while unfortunate, serves a greater purpose: your desire to inhabit a world in which one can support war crimes, settler colonization, limitations to academic freedom, ethnic cleansing, administrative corruption, corporatization of higher education, suppression of free speech, nuclear proliferation, donor overreach, police intervention, military occupation, top-down discipline and biological determinism without the inconvenience of condemnation.
Conclusion: Talking about irony
While it might be life affirming for you to bemoan how colonization is so damn complicated, I humbly suggest that those who endure the brute end of conquest and settlement are probably tired of hearing this particular lament.
I don’t mean to nag, but if I can be frank: you’ve really been screwing up the whole dialogue thing. Dialogue is supposed to facilitate conversation, not shut it down. Yet somehow your calls for dialogue have a strange way of suggesting that you don’t want to discuss certain things at all.
Using my handy guide will take care of that problem. I’m not falsely boasting when I say it has the potential to alter the dynamics of public conversation around the question of Palestine.
Already, millions of Arabs, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, atheists, Israelis, Palestinians, Blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians, Turks, Europeans, Persians, Natives, heterosexuals, queers, sluts, prudes, vegans, carnivores, pescatarians, baldheads, longhairs, bikers, drivers, pedestrians, minors, elders, students, teachers and retirees are in acute community through a collective devotion to ending this so-called conflict.
Perhaps you find these wonderful sites of discussion and interchange profoundly threatening. If so, you should speak with somebody who might help you overcome the fear of dialogue involving more than one person.
Communists may have lost the Cold War, but that minor defeat will surely be forgotten in the annals of history now that scientists in Pyongyang have announced a much more important victory: They have created hangover-free alcohol.
According to the Pyongyang Times, the liquor is around 30 to 40 percent alcohol and “exudes national flavor.” That patriotic taste can be credited to ginseng and rice, the alcohol’s two main ingredients. And it could even classify ginseng as a miracle plant: In August, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un claimed that a drug made with it can also cure Ebola, AIDS, and cancer.
The new liquor, called Koryo, was reportedly made out of insam — a local kind of ginseng. But scientists also replaced the sugar with scorched rice, which they credit with reducing the chances of a hangover the next day.
The Taedonggang Foodstuff Factory is responsible for this week’s success, and the Pyongyang Times said it won a “quality medal for preserving national smack.”
“Koryo Liquor, which is made of six-year-old Kaesong Koryo insam, known as being highest in medicinal effect, and the scorched rice, is highly appreciated by experts and lovers as it is suave and causes no hangover,” the article says. It also adds that the alcohol “has already been registered as a national scientific and technological hit.”
Foreign Policy was unable to independently verify the qualifications of North Korean experts and lovers, or find out what it takes to be considered a scientific and technological hit in the country.
That’s in part because as the world’s most isolated state, much of what goes on in North Korea remains mysterious to the outside world. But foreigners who have successfully visited Pyongyang report that citizens consume a huge amount of alcohol on a regular basis.
And in 2013, after Kim ordered the executions of two of his uncle’s closest aides, reports circulated that he was “very drunk” when he made that decision.
So for him, this might just be the biggest win for communism yet.
The power elites—our corporate rulers and the security and surveillance apparatus—rewrite laws to make their criminal behavior “legal.” It is a two-tiered system. One set of laws for us. Another set of laws for them.
by Chris Hedges
Courtesy: Truth Dig
( January 19, 2016, Boston, Sri Lanka Guardian) If you are poor, you will almost never go to trial—instead you will be forced to accept a plea deal offered by government prosecutors. If you are poor, the word of the police, who are not averse to fabricating or tampering with evidence, manipulating witnesses and planting guns or drugs, will be accepted in a courtroom as if it was the word of God. If you are poor, and especially if you are of color, almost anyone who can verify your innocence will have a police record of some kind and thereby will be invalidated as a witness. If you are poor, you will be railroaded in assembly-line production from a town or city where there are no jobs through the police stations, county jails and courts directly into prison. And if you are poor, because you don’t have money for adequate legal defense, you will serve sentences that are decades longer than those for equivalent crimes anywhere else in the industrialized world.
If you are a poor person of color in America you understand this with a visceral fear. You have no chance. Being poor has become a crime. And this makes mass incarceration the most pressing civil rights issue of our era.
The 10-part online documentary “Making a Murderer,” by writer-directors Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, chronicles the endemic corruption of the judicial system. The film focuses on the case of Steven Avery and his nephew, Brendan Dassey, who were given life sentences for murder without any tangible evidence linking them to the crime. As admirable as the documentary was, however, it focused on a case where the main defendant, Avery, had competent defense. He was also white. The blatant corruption of, and probable conspiracy by, the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office in Wisconsin and then-Calumet County District Attorney Ken Kratz is nothing compared with what goes on in the well-oiled and deeply cynical system in place in inner-city courts. The accused in poor urban centers are lined up daily like sheep in a chute and shipped to prison with a startling alacrity. The attempts by those who put Avery and Dassey behind bars to vilify them further after the release of the film misses the point: The two men, like most of the rest of the poor behind bars in the United States, did not receive a fair trial. Whether they did or did not murder Teresa Halbach—and the film makes a strong case that they did not—is a moot point.
A new website giving parents and teachers advice on protecting children from extremism is being launched by the government as it seeks to combat "the spell of twisted ideologies".
TUESDAY19 JANUARY 2016
The website, Educate Against Hate, is one of several measures the government is pursuing to counter Islamist extremism.
There will be an escalation of Ofsted's investigations into unregistered, illegal schools, tougher action to prosecute these schools, and a consultation on registering children who go missing from school.
Education Secretary Nicky Morgan is announcing the measures at Bethnal Green Academy, the east London school attended by three girls - Shamima Begum, Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase - who left Britain for Syria last year and were last heardof in Islamic State-controlled Raqqa.
Educate Against Hate will offer advice based on resources and guidance drawn up by the government and charities including the NSPCC and Childnet.
'Grasp of extremists'
Mrs Morgan said: "Today's announcement of resources and tougher powers to protect young, impressionable minds from radical views sends a clear message to extremists - our children are firmly out of your reach.
"Educate Against Hate will provide teachers and parents with the expertise they need to challenge radical views and keep their children safe. Our tougher stand against illegal schools will help prevent children from falling under the grasp of extremists.
"And by improving intelligence on where children go when they deregister from schools, we will help prevent future incidents of young, promising children falling under the spell of twisted ideologies."
'Misogynistic, homophobic, anti-Semitic'
Shadow education secretary Lucy Powell said it was important that children were kept safe, but she added that "warm words from ministers now mean very little, after they failed to take swift action to close illegal schools, where children were being exposed to narrow curriculums, misogynistic, homophobic and anti-Semitic material".
Last month, it was revealed that schools are be told to set filters and monitor pupils' internet access, amid growing concerns that some youngsters are at risk of being targeted by extremist groups.
Lawyer Tasnime Akunjee, who represents the families of the three girls who travelled to Syria, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "They are in Raqqa, or were there certainly up until a few weeks ago.
"Contact has been lost with them for some weeks now, so to be honest we have no idea what their status is at the moment."
Commenting on the govenment's anti-extremism strategy, Mr Akunjee said: "I would agree that something needs to be done, surely. The difficulty is in trusting in a system that has continued to produce, frankly, no results, and indeed attract criticism from pretty much every source there possibly could be."
Protesters stand near burning tyres as they gather to block the highway connecting Nepal and India, during a general strike called by Madhesi protesters demonstrating against the new constitution in Birgunj, Nepal November 5, 2015.
REUTERS/NAVESH CHITRAKAR/FILES
KATHMANDU| BY GOPAL SHARMA-Tue Jan 19, 2016
Talks between the Nepali government and minority groups to resolve a dispute over a new constitution have fallen apart, opposition leaders said on Tuesday, dashing hopes that protests that have led to crippling fuel shortages will end soon.
More than 50 people have been killed since August in anti-government protests in the Tarai region, a narrow strip of plains that runs along Nepal's southern border with India.
A resulting slowdown in cross-border truck traffic has plunged the landlocked nation into a fuel crisis that has hampered aid to survivors of last year's deadly earthquakes and spawned a lucrative black market.
The ethnic Madhesi groups who live in the Tarai say Nepal's new constitution, its first since the nation abolished its centuries-old monarchy, alienates their members, granting them low representation in parliament and government bodies.
After talks fell apart on Monday night, dozens of Madhesi activists burned tyres on the road in the southern business town of Birgunj, police said, in continuing protest against the charter's carving the lowland region into federal states dominated by mountain communities.
Nepal blames India, its largest trading partner, for siding with the protesters near its border and invoking an unofficial blockade on trucks crossing from India into Nepal, a charge that India has repeatedly denied.
In the eastern border town of Kakarvitta, a long row of motorcycles and scooters stood in the middle of a bridge marking the border with India, as their owners poured smuggled fuel into their tanks.
"It's been good business," said a woman named Devi, who came from the Indian border town of Raniganj to sell petrol to Nepalese in plastic tubs and bottles.
The United Madhesi Front, which wants state boundaries to be redrawn to give their communities more power, said talks with government negotiators that started two weeks ago had become "meaningless".
Defence Minister Bhim Rawal said the boundary issue would be settled by a political committee in three months, but Madhesi party leaders were not convinced.
"We can't trust the government," Laxman Lal Karna, another Madhesi leader, told Reuters. "We have been betrayed in the past on similar assurances."
(Additional reporting by Ross Adkin in Kakarvitta; Editing by Nick Macfie)
Clashes in Sudan's Darfur region could threaten thousands Fresh fighting between rebels and government forces could strike a remote area of Darfur where there is risk of wide-spread displacement President Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted on war crimes charges related to Darfur, has been battling an insurgency since 2003 (AFP)
AFP-Tuesday 19 January 2016
Thousands of civilians in a remote area of Sudan's war-hit Darfur could see fresh fighting between rebels and government forces nearby, the UN said on Tuesday amid ongoing clashes.
Government troops and rebels have been battling around the mountainous Jebel Marra area straddling Central, South and North Darfur states which are seen as a stronghold for insurgents battling President Omar al-Bashir since 2003.
"Thousands of people live in this remote part of Darfur, and the protection of men, women and children is a top priority amid the chaos of fighting which could lead to widespread displacement of entire communities," said Ivo Freijsen, the Sudan head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
"The impact on civilians of the ongoing hostilities that are being reported in the Jebel Marra between government and rebel forces can only be of paramount concern to the humanitarian community here," he said in a statement.
The clashes come despite Bashir - who is wanted on war crimes charges related to Darfur - announcing a one-month extension to a ceasefire he declared in September covering Darfur as well as the South Kordofan and Blue Nile states where he faces separate insurgencies.
The UN-African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur (UNAMID) said in a statement on Tuesday it "is still receiving reports of continued fighting between both parties in Central Darfur".
"The fighting allegedly resulted in an undetermined number of casualties on both sides," it said, adding that it had also received reports that houses had been destroyed in the clashes.
It said it had also received reports that government aircraft had dropped bombs north of a UNAMID base in the Jebel Marra town of Nertiti on Saturday and Sunday "leading to undetermined casualties".
The Sudanese military did not immediately comment on the latest clashes.
Jebel Marra has been quiet in recent months, but last year it was the scene of fierce fighting between government forces and the Sudan Liberation Army-Abdul Wahid (SLA-AW).
The SLA-AW is one of the groups that rebelled against Bashir's Arab-dominated government nearly 13 years ago, complaining that the western region was being marginalised.
Bashir unleashed warplanes, ground forces and allied militia to crush the insurgents and was indicted by the International Criminal Court in 2009 for alleged war crimes in the region.
More than 300,000 people have been killed in the fighting since 2003, and there are some 2.5 million people displaced by the fighting living in Darfur, according to the UN.
UNAMID deployed to Darfur in 2007 to protect civilians and secure humanitarian aid deliveries.
Report by UK charity Oxfam calls for a crackdown on tax havens as the world’s wealthiest hide $7.6 trillion from taxes.
Report by UK charity Oxfam calls for a crackdown on tax havens as the world’s wealthiest hide $7.6 trillion from taxes.
( January 19, 2016, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) The Oxfam report An Economy for the 1%, shows that the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population has fallen by a trillion dollars since 2010, a drop of 41 percent. This has occurred despite the global population increasing by around 400 million people during that period. Meanwhile, the wealth of the richest 62 has increased by more than half a trillion dollars to $1.76tr. The report also shows how women are disproportionately affected by inequality – of the current ‘62’, 53 are men and just nine are women.
Although world leaders have increasingly talked about the need to tackle inequality, and in September agreed a global goal to reduce it, the gap between the richest and the rest has widened dramatically in the past 12 months. Oxfam’s prediction, made ahead of last year’s Davos, that the 1% would soon own more than the rest of us, actually came true in 2015 – a year earlier than expected.
Oxfam is calling for urgent action to tackle the extreme inequality crisis which threatens to undermine the progress made in tackling poverty during the last quarter of a century. As a priority, it is calling for an end to the era of tax havens which has seen the increasing use of offshore centers by rich individuals and companies to avoid paying their fair share to society. This has denied governments valuable resources needed to tackle poverty and inequality.
Winnie Byanyima, Oxfam International Executive Director, who will again attend Davos having co-chaired last year’s event, said: “It is simply unacceptable that the poorest half of the world’s population owns no more than a few dozen super-rich people who could fit onto one bus.
“World leaders’ concern about the escalating inequality crisis has so far not translated into concrete action – the world has become a much more unequal place and the trend is accelerating. We cannot continue to allow hundreds of millions of people to go hungry while resources that could be used to help them are sucked up by those at the top. Full Story>>>
A man lights a candle at the site where Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was killed in Moscow in 2015. Russian dissidents are voicing fears that more assassinations may be looming. (Maxim Zmeyev/Reuters)
MOSCOW — Nearly a year after the assassination of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, a senior ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin is again calling for violence against the Kremlin’s opponents.
The comments, made by the head of the Russian region of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, over the past week and culminating Tuesday with the suggestion that Putin’s opponents should be sent to “a good psychiatric hospital,” echo the harsh anti-opposition rhetoric that flared in Russia early last year. At the time, Putin’s supporters took to the streets of Moscow to threaten violence against those seen as favoring peace with Ukraine. On Feb. 27, Nemtsov was assassinated in the shadow of the Kremlin, in one of the highest-profile political murders since the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Russian authorities have prosecuted Chechens with links to Kadyrov for the killing. They have not officially traced it back to Kadyrov himself, and he has denied any responsibility. But Western diplomats, opposition activists and even some senior Russian officials say privately that they believe that the orders came from the very top in Chechnya.
That has some on Kadyrov’s new hit list — most of whom are allies of Nemtsov — taking the Chechen leader’s campaign seriously. The strongman controls a security force of heavily armed fighters who operate largely with impunity both in Chechnya and Moscow. Chechens have been tied to other murders of Kremlin critics, including opposition journalist Anna Politkovskaya, although Kadyrov has never been officially implicated in any of them.
Bus carries 13 single men to Russian border, despite warnings that Norway may be breaching UN refugee convention
A refugee smokes a cigarette outside the sleeping facilities at the arrival centre for refugees near the town on Kirkenes in northern Norway. Photograph: Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images
David Crouch in Gothenburg-Tuesday 19 January 2016
Norway has begun using buses to move asylum seekers across its Arctic border with Russia, despite criticism from the UN and temperatures approaching 30 degrees below zero.
Immigration police confirmed on Tuesday night that a bus carrying 13 single men left the reception centre at Kirkenes for the Russian border at around 6pm. Eight of the men had volunteered to go, police said.
Immigration minister Sylvi Listhaug said the refugees would be taken to the Russian towns of Nikel and Murmansk.
“If Norway is to have a fair asylum policy, we need to send back those who are not entitled to protection,” Listhaug told parliament on Tuesday evening. Any refugee with a valid Russian visa would be deported, she said.
However, the UN warned last week that Norway was likely to be in breach of the UN refugee convention.
“They can end up in a no man’s land where they risk freezing to death,” Vincent Cochetel, the UN high commissioner for refugees, said last week. “There are large cracks in the Russian asylum system. We believe Norway is wrong to regard Russia as a safe country for people who need protection.”
In an unprecedented move by the authorities, refugees were told their applications for asylum had been rejected only a few hours before their planned deportations, giving them no chance to appeal, according to Halvor Frihagen, an asylum lawyer in Oslo.
“I do not know of any similar deportations since the Nazi occupation of Norway during the war, when Jews were arrested and given no opportunity to appeal. It is the most serious situation since that time,” Frihagen said, pointing out that Russia had a very poor record on asylum rights.
Public opinion in Noway is divided. Some are afraid that too many refugees are coming to Norway, but others show “huge support for refugees”, Frihagen said.
“The government of the populist right and conservatives wants to make a very clear stance that they do not want too many asylum seekers.”
The European court of human rights rejected a last ditch appeal by Frihagen on Tuesday to halt the deportations. A spokesperson said the court did not give explanations for its decisions.
Norway’s crackdown on asylum would create “a black market of paperless people”, as refugees would get scared and go into hiding, said Ask Ebeltoft, an activist in Trondheim for the group Refugees Welcome in the Arctic.
“It is impossible now to seek asylum in Norway unless you swim here from the Middle East,” Ebeltoft said.
Asylum rights groups were particularly worried about people from Balochistan in Pakistan, he said. “It’s a really dangerous area, we are very scared that the Russians will send them back and they will be killed.”
Families awaiting deportation in Kirkenes on Tuesday were “very depressed and afraid, especially the Syrians”, said Ahmed Isam, 26, a Sudanese student also expecting to be sent back to Russia imminently.
“At first I was afraid, but if I am afraid I will not survive,” Isam said, speaking from the immigration police reception centre in Kirkenese on Tuesday night. The police had picked him up from his accommodation in Trondheim at 5am on Monday morning and brought him here, he said.
WASHINGTON -- An Indian-origin psychiatrist dubbed "Dr Death" by police has been arrested in the US after 36 of his patients died with at least 12 killed by overdose on prescription medication.
Narendra Nagareddy, a psychiatrist in Clayton County, Georgia, has been put behind bars on suspicion of over- prescribing prescription medication and running a 'pill mill'.
Nearly 40 federal and local agents raided Nagareddy's offices and later moved on to his home to seize more assets.
"He's a psychiatrist in Jonesboro who has been over-prescribing opiates and benzodiazepine and the last several years has had a multitude of overdoses and overdose deaths," Clayton County Police Chief Mike Register told WSB-TV Channel 2 News.
Agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Clayton County District Attorney's office, the Clayton County Police Department and the Georgia Department of Community Supervision converged on Nagareddy's office on Thursday armed with a search warrant and an arrest warrant for the psychiatrist.
"He's charged with prescribing pain medication which is outside his profession as a psychiatrist and not for a legitimate purpose for the patient," said Clayton County District Attorney Tracy Graham Lawson.
According to legal documents, "36 of Nagareddy's patients have died while being prescribed controlled substances from Dr Nagareddy, 12 of which have been confirmed by investigators through autopsy reports to have been the result of prescription drug intoxication."
"Former and current patients have admitted to obtaining controlled substance prescriptions from Dr Nagareddy without having a legitimate medical need," the documents said.
"People come to this person for help, and instead of getting help, they're met with deadly consequences," Clayton County Police Chief Register was quoted as saying. "If the allegations are true, he is Dr Death, no doubt about it."
The district attorney's office said they also filed a RICO civil action to seize Nagareddy's assets.
One of Nagareddy's patient has been identified as Audrey Austin, a 29-year-old mother of two. She died of a fatal prescription drug overdose just days after she visited Nagareddy.
"She was an addict and he made it very easy for her," Audrey's mother Ruth Carr was quoted as saying by New York Daily News.
"Americans are abusing prescription drugs at a truly alarming level," said Clyde E Shelley Jr with the DEA.
"Doctors hold a position of public trust and to betray that position cannot be tolerated," Shelly said.
The highest percentage of school candidates that have qualified for university education from the advanced level examination of 2015 has been from Jaffna District, Examination Department sources said.
According to Examination Department sources out of a total of 7,346 candidates who had sat for the examination from the Jaffna District, 4,872 of them had passed the said examination resulting in a 66.33 percentage.
The lowest percentage has been recorded from Polonnaruwa District. In the Polonnaruwa District a total of 3,455 candidates had taken the examination of which only 1,961 had qualified for the university entrance, which has resulted in a 56.76 percentage.
Meanwhile, Colombo District has had the ignominy of having the most number of candidates (2,071) who had failed in all three subjects. That is percentage wise is 7.99. The second place in the list has gone to the Gampaha District which is 1,771.
The Western Province has gained the first place from the Biology stream while the Northern Province has claimed the first place in the Maths stream.
The Sabaragamuwa Province has gained first place in both Biology and Commerce while the Uva Province has gained the first place in Arts stream.
Northern Province Chief Minister C.V. Wigneswaran will face pressure to resign or a no-confidence motion will be brought against him at the Northern Provincial Council if he fails to tow the line of the Tamil National Alliance.
TNA Northern Provincial Council (NPC) members will meet Wigneswaran today for key talks after having similar talks last week. TNA Northern Provincial Council member M.K. Sivajilingham told The Sunday Leader that today’s discussion will be a follow up to last week’s talks but dismissed claims that Wigneswaran will be asked to resign.
He also said that a crucial meeting will also be held on Thursday in Kilinochchi between the TNA Parliamentary group and TNA provincial council members of the North and East. However at talks held last week the TNA NPC members had reminded Wigneswaran on the TNA policies and the fact that he was elected to the post through the TNA. “Wigneswaran was told that we do not operate as individuals but as a party,” sources said with regards to the meeting held last week between Wigneswaran and the TNA members. The TNA has been working in a cordial manner with the government to address issues in the North but Wigneswaran has taken a different line and has been openly critical of the government.
Last Friday Wigneswaran slammed the Government at event attended by Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.
Speaking at the National Thaipongal festival in Jaffna also attended by UK State Minister Hugo Swire, the Northern Chief Minister said that while the Tamils in the North recognise the change following the elections last year, they still live in fear and suspicion. He slammed the presence of a large number of soldiers in the North, the failure to free more land held by the military and the failure to abolish the Prevention of Terrorism Act. The Prime Minister later responded to the comments made by Wigneswaran saying the issues were being addressed in consultation with the Tamil National Alliance.
Jan 19, 2016
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