2016-04-22 Four children and another individual were hospitalized last night when a jeep belonging to the Additional Secretary of the Disaster Management Ministry K. Amalanadan crashed into a three- wheeler in Chilaw. The injured, travelling in the three- wheeler, were admitted to the Chilaw and Kathankudi hospitals. The Chilaw police are conducting further investigations. (T.I.Jawfer Khan)
A financial fraud involving the loss of vital foreign exchange earnings beyond calculation had been caused to country through the smuggling out of large stocks of gems since 2013, Chairman of the National Gem and Jewellery Authority Asanke Welagedara said.
He said the fraud was uncovered as a result of a state audit.
He said the large-scale fraud had occurred by way of a voucher system called the 'N.N.S', costing an annual fee of Rs.1,500 US dollars that allowed for any number of gems to be taken outside of the country without question.
The current Chairman said the voucher system had been implemented by the former Chairman of the National Gem and Jewellery Authority Amithe Gamage, under the directive of the former President Mahinda Rajapaksa.
He said the issuing of the voucher was restricted to businessmen close to the former President and had his cronies. All objections to this voucher system had been disregarded, he said. 145 vouchers had been issued during the tenure of Mahinda Rajapaksa.
Chairman Asanke Welagedara said President Maithripala Sirisena had directed the Authority to cancel the voucher system and introduce a better system through which the country would cease to lose foreign earnings. He said the Authority hoped to introduce the new system by May 15,
She has given many speeches encouraging students to back BDS and observe its guidelines within their campuses – especially the boycott of Israeli academic institutions complicit in abuses of Palestinian rights.
After serving as the Black students’ officer, Bouattia will be the first Black Muslim woman elected president in the 94 years of NUS history.
Smears
When the NUS passed its latest BDS motion in June last year, the Israeli prime minister falsely claimed the organization supported Islamic State, the violent extremist group also known as ISIS.
“They boycott Israel but they refuse to boycott ISIS. That tells you everything you want to know about the BDS movement. They condemn Israel and do not condemn ISIS,” Benjamin Netanyahu claimed.
Predictably, right-wing media have recycled this same lie to demonize Bouattia and have also attempted to smear her as anti-Semitic.
But the truth was that the NUS national executive council adopted a resolution at its 3 December 2014 meetingthat called for ISIS to be “condemned” as “a reactionary terrorist organization that carries out atrocities” against people of the regions where it operates.
Not only that, but it was Bouattia herself who submitted the motion, speaking in its favor at the meeting where it was adopted with no speakers against it.
The previous September, the executive had rejected a motion on Kurdish solidarity that contained similar language, but its decision had nothing to do with the condemnation of ISIS whatsoever. The resolution was considered flawed because it encouraged students to spy on each other.
The BBC’s website on Wednesday initially claimed that Bouattia had “refused to condemn” ISIS.
After outrage at this false claim was expressed on social media, the BBC appears to have removed that particular lie from the article, but without issuing a correction or apology.
The Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz reported Bouattia’s victory with the headline, “UK student union’s new president supports Palestinian ‘resistance.’” The article repeats and amplifies the false allegations found in UK media that Bouattia is an ISIS sympathizer.
Smears
Bouattia anticipated these media attacks.
In her winning election speech at the NUS national conference, she said: “I know many of you will have seen my name dragged through the mud by right-wing media. You will have read that I am a terrorist, that my politics are driven by hate.”
“How wrong that is,” she said, given her background of having to flee her home country Algeria and seek refuge in the UK.
As a seven-year-old child, she “saw a country ripped apart by terror” and was “pushed to exile by its doing.”
“I know too well the damage done by racism and persecution. I faced it every day,” she said, promising, “I will continue to fight, in all its forms, whoever its targets, whether it is anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, xenophobia or any other bigoted idea.”
Addressing the prime minister, she said “David Cameron may not like me or our movement, but when we’re strong he’s forced to listen.”
You can watch the rest of her electrifying speech in the video above.
Anti-racist
BDS campaigners, including many Jews, are systemically smeared with the false charge of anti-Semitism by pro-Israel media and campaign groups. So Bouattia is no exception in this regard.
Prior to her victory, several UK Jewish student societies sent her an open letter questioning her “past rhetoric” against Zionism.
She replied in an open letter rejecting the accusations and emphasizing that disagreement over “anti-Zionist politics” is “a political argument, not one of faith.”
Bouattia made sure to draw the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, reaffirming that efforts to conflate them “are dangerous and have become the excuse for many racist and fascist attacks up and down the country and in the world, which I am sure we all want to end.”
Bouattia’s activism is driven by her passion towards fighting racism of all forms.
This has been evident in her campaigning, which has ranged from supporting Holocaust memorial day to efforts to combat Islamophobia.
Zionism is a settler-colonial ideology and practice that led to the establishment of Israel on the ruins of ethnically cleansed Palestinian lands. To this day Israel continues to discriminate against Palestinians based on this ethno-religious ideology, especially by refusing to allow refugees to return to their lands solely on the basis that they are not Jewish.
Islamophobia
Bouattia was one of the main campaigners behind the recent launch of the Students Not Suspects campaign, which aimed at fighting the UK government’s Islamophobic “anti-radicalization” strategy, Prevent.
She appeared in this recent video that aimed to mobilize students and academics to put an end to Prevent on UK campuses.
Prevent “forces colleges and universities to spy on students,” the video explains. It creates “a climate of suspicion around students’ political and religious view,” and promotes “a culture of surveillance and self-censorship,” which is aimed at silencing students and restricting academic freedom.
“Because of the racialized way that counter-terrorism initiatives are formed,” Bouattia says in the video, “it’s black and Muslim students that are most at risk. And so far they’ve been disproportionately targeted.”
The video also mentions two cases previously reported by The Electronic Intifada: the academic conference on Israel at Southampton University which has been banned two years in a row, and the Bath University conference on conflict in the modern world which was subjected to UK and Israeli government monitoring last year.
Bouattia’s election is a sign of changing times in the UK student movement.
Back in 2009, the then president of NUS Wes Streeting not only campaigned against BDS, he went so far as to join an Israeli government anti-BDS working group in Jerusalem which slandered the nonviolent civil society movement as “evil.”
Now a right-wing MP in the Labour party, Streeting Wednesday reacted to the election of the first non-white NUS president in the union’s history by claiming that the “NUS is lost.”
US president Barack Obama has touched down in London. He is presumably going to use his visit to tell prime minister David Cameron why it is in the best interests of both the US and the West for the UK to stay in the European Union.
The problem is that the EU has fallen out of favor many of its most ardent supporters: Martin Schulz, president of the European Parliament, recently described the EU as a “Frankenstein,” sucking democracy out of the member states.
What Schulz wants is a fully-fledged United States of Europe. He wants the dividing of power between executive, legislature, and judiciary branches. He wants one sovereign federation, with a large internal market, a single currency, a charter of fundamental rights, and a single defense policy.
Obama is unlikely to make this particular case to Cameron. The debate is far too contentious at the moment, across the EU. Voters remain overwhelmingly loyal to their own constitutional states; they do not want “more Europe.”
They may get it, nonetheless. Brussels has a habit of asking countries to vote until they give the right answer, sacking governments who disagree with it, all the while lecturing member states about democracy and human rights. The latest example is the Dutch vote against the EU-Ukrainian association agreement, which will go ahead regardless.
The “special relationship”
Obama is much too canny to wade in too deep. He knows very well that the EU is far from popular in Europe and has ambitions far beyond its reach. Obama is much more likely to make his case using historical precedents. After two US military interventions in Europe’s wars, the US has a vital interest in the European project, just as it does in Japan’s future, and the prosperity of Southeast Asia. A rising China and an unpredictable Russia are challenging enough. Few will benefit if the UK is allowed to create further disunion in Europe.
The official UK position on the EU is in more agreement with Schulz. In the 1972 Act of Accession, the conservative government of the time signed up to a supranational vision of Europe’s future. A European union would be the second pillar of a strengthened Atlantic alliance. This is still Whitehall’s position. Echoes of 1776
There is a problem, though. Whitehall has never managed to sell its European vision to a skeptical public. The centuries-old UK tradition is to vote the rascals in who make the laws, and kick them out if they do not match expectations. They frequently do not.
This popular frustration has lead to the high rate of political turnover. Political parties run the country for a while, but soon enough the electorate sends them packing. The problem with this system, at least from a civilian perspective, is that Brussels is the source of growing volumes of laws, which the UK electorate cannot sanction. The EU is an unelected dictatorship.
Not surprisingly, the British Social Attitudes Survey of 2014 records that only 15% of the UK public backs the Whitehall/Schulz view. In the survey, 25% of respondents want to leave, 15% want EU powers to stay the same, and 38% want the EU’s powers to be reduced. At best, it seems Brits are ready to accept a minimalist EU. And they certainly don’t want to be part of anything they don’t have control over. Obama’s dilemma
Presumably, president Obama has already recognized this problem. After all, concerns over representation inspired the American colonists in 1776. This puts Obama in a tight spot. He must continue to advocate for what has been a central plank of US foreign policy since the days of Harry Truman. For all the talk of the US “pivot” towards Asia, Europe remains vital to the US world position.
On the other hand, if Obama openly endorses the Schulz/Whitehall vision of a supranational Europe, he is in effect telling the UK electorate that their concerns about representation don’t really matter and they may have to live with a neutered parliament. This is an impossible demand to make of a country. No friendly ally could ever possibly propose that a country abandon its sovereignty for the benefit of the alliance.
I doubt very much that the US president would advocate such a thing. What he can say, however, is that the EU must be founded on the constitutional states of Europe in order to be sustainable. The best-case scenario
This compromise may have a chance if two things happen. The first is the death of Schulz’ dreams of a European great power, centered in Berlin and Brussels. The other is that Cameron must find a way to rewrite the 1972 Accession Act. References to the EU as a supranational body should be substituted for a reassertion of UK sovereignty.
The UK could then stay in the EU, but with clear discretionary powers to analyze, amend, and reject any proposal emanating from the EU institutions. We’re not talking about automatic rejection, of course. There would simply need to be a mechanism allowing the UK to reserve the right to make its own laws—while listening to good ideas, wherever they may come from.
If this all sounds a little too good to be true, that’s probably because right now, it is. Schulz won’t bury his dream, and Cameron won’t have the 1972 Act revised. Apparently, the prime minister does not want to win a massive majority in the referendum.
If the prime minister were to change his mind, he would pave the way for the a landslide victory while cementing the UK’s status as a champion of a Europe of cooperating states—and a key player in the US global alliance system. Ultimately, the June 23 referendum is Cameron’s to lose.
Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif looks on during a lecture on Sri Lanka-Pakistan Relations in Colombo, Sri Lanka January 5, 2016.REUTERS/DINUKA LIYANAWATTE/FILES
BY ASAD HASHIM-Fri Apr 22, 2016
Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said on Friday he would ask the Supreme Court set up an investigation into revelations about his finances made in the leaked Panama Papers, bowing to opposition demands to strengthen the enquiry.
Sharif has already set up a commission that he promised will clear him of allegations, based on leaked documents from a Panama law firm, that offshore companies headed by members of his family were avoiding paying taxes or disguising assets.
But opposition leaders, including Imran Khan, have said such a body, headed by a retired judge, would not be credible or independent enough.
"I have decided that I will write a letter to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court so that he can appoint a commission for the investigation of this matter, so that those who are making these demands ... can see the extent of our innocence," Sharif said in a rare televised address to the nation.
Earlier this month, leaked documents from the Mossack Fonseca law firm in Panama showed Sharif's sons Hassan and Hussain and daughter Maryam owned at least three offshore holding companies registered in the British Virgin Islands.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which studied the papers, said those companies had engaged in at least $25 million in property and acquisition deals. Mossack Fonseca denies any wrongdoing, as does Sharif.
Sharif and his family have repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, saying that assets were legally acquired through the family's network of businesses and industries in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.
Political opponents however, have alleged that the assets were gained through corruption during Sharif's previous two stints as prime minister in the 1990s.
Khan is due to address a rally in the capital Islamabad on Sunday, where he is expected to announce the launch of a protest movement against the prime minister and his government in reaction to the Panama Papers.
Sharif took a combative tone in his televised address on Friday, repeatedly accusing his political opponents of opportunism for previous protests and the lodging of allegations against him.
"If nothing is proven against me, then those people who are making false allegations everyday, will they ask for forgiveness from the nation?" he asked, in closing his speech.
(Writing by Asad Hashim; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
Matt Frei interviews Imran Khan on Channel 4 News.
THURSDAY21 APRIL 2016 In the interview, we also asked about Zac Goldsmith, the brother of Imran Khan's former wife, and the London mayoral race. After the interview, Imran Khan issued a statement saying:
"Sadiq Khan's faith was not an issue in any aspect of Zac's campaign to become Mayor of London, which he is conducting with integrity, honesty, and by appealing to Londoners regardless of their colour or creed."
BY JOHN HUDSON-APRIL 22, 2016
A senior United Nations official said Friday that the five-year civil war in Syria has killed some 400,000 people, a staggering figure that underscores the war’s carnage — and is far higher than the previous U.N. toll of 250,000 calculated a year and a half ago.
Staffan de Mistura, the U.N.’s special envoy in Syria, said the 400,000 figure is based on his “own analysis,” and is not an official U.N. figure, but it comes close to a recent calculation by a Syrian research group that estimated at least 470,000 Syrians had died in the war.
The U.N. stopped counting the death toll in Syria due to a lack of confidence in its own data, a nearly insurmountable problem in a complex conflict involving a vast array of militant groups and a government eager to downplay casualty figures.
“We had 250,000 as a figure two years ago,” said de Mistura. “Well two years ago was two years ago.”
De Mistura’s remarks come as an uptick of fighting between the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the rebel groups working to unseat him has all-but unravelled the fragile cessation of hostilities agreement, sponsored by the United States and Russia, that went into effect on Feb. 27.
The U.N. envoy vowed to continue the current peace talks in Geneva through Wednesday of next week despite a decision by the main armed opposition group to demand a suspension of the negotiations until the Assad regime stops bombarding rebel-held towns, releases detainees, and provides more access for humanitarian aid.
“We asked to postpone,” Salem al-Muslat, the spokesman for the opposition High Negotiations Committee, told Foreign Policy in a telephone interview. “But most of us are still here in Geneva and we’ve had meetings discussing technical issues.”
The talks are aimed at finding an agreement on a transitional government to end the conflict, which has created the biggest refugee crisis since World War II and allowed the rise of the Islamic State militant group.
Riad Hijab, the opposition’s general coordinator, left the Swiss city for meetings in Jordan. But Muslat said if developments significantly change, Hijab will be back in Geneva “within hours.”
Atena Farghadani, 28, seen here with an art piece, was tried for 'illegitimate relations' with her lawyer after they shook hands (Facebook) Friday 22 April 2016 Amnesty International says treatment of Atena Farghadani, jailed for 'insulting MPs through paintings', was tantamount to torture
Iran was criticised by rights groups this week after it confirmed carrying out a “virginity test” on a woman imprisoned for her artwork.
Atena Farghadani, a painter and political activist, was arrested in August 2014 after publishing a cartoon depicting MPs and government officials as barnyard animals on Facebook in protest against a draft law restricting access to birth control.
Farghadani, 28, was sentenced to 12 years and nine months in prison for crimes including “gathering and colluding against national security”, “insulting members of parliament through paintings” and “spreading propaganda against the system”.
In a letter smuggled out of prison last October, Farghadani said she had been forced by authorities to submit to a “virginity test”, a procedure described by Amnesty International as “a violation of international law on torture”.
She said the procedure took place shortly before a trial for “illegitimate relations” with her lawyer after the two shook hands in court.
The virginity test was used as a means to gather evidence for the trial, in which Farghadani and her lawyer were eventually acquitted.
Authorities have now confirmed that the virginity test took place, telling the UN that “prison authorities carried out tests to respond to allegations of sexual assault against her on some websites”.
The response from Iranian authorities is included in the UN’s March 2016 report into the human-rights situation in Iran, which also notes concerns over reported “violations of fair trial standards”.
After Farghadani first wrote of being subjected to a virginity test, several other Iranian women who had been imprisoned spoke out about their own experiences of the test.
Farghadani has previously spoken in a video of being strip-searched by prison guards after they discovered that she was smuggling paper cups to her cell to use as paper for paintings.
It is not known how common virginity testing is in Iranian prisons.
Amnesty International, in a briefing published on Thursday, said the practice is “highly discriminatory”, and has previously warned that it is often used to stigmatise women prisoners.
Human Rights Watch, meanwhile, has also denounced virginity tests, saying they “constitute sexual assault”.
About 600 US-bound Africans are stranded in Costa Rica after officials blocked a major migration route to America, leading local aid workers to warn of a humanitarian crisis if their number continues to rise.
African and Latin American migrants have long passed through Costa Rica on their way to the US, but their passage has been blocked by the authorities in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, the next country on the route north.
This has led to a buildup of people in the border town of Paso Canoas, where they are now sleeping rough in a makeshift detention camp.
NEWMontserrat Solano, Costa Rica’s human rights ombudsman told The Guardian that officials were unsure where the migrants were from. “They claim they are Africans and some of them definitely are, but it is unclear which country they come from. They don’t have papers and many are not very forthcoming about where they came from.”
Legally Costa Rica can only detain the migrants for 30 days at which point the government will either need to deport them or release them. According to Solano, deportation would be illegal unless the government can determine where the migrants are from and ensure that they will not experience grave human rights abuses if they return.
“They say they want to go to the United States and that makes them harder to grant refugee status because they clearly don’t want to stay in Costa Rica,” Solano said.
The Costa Rican government says it has not decided what to do with them, and in the meantime they are being tended to by local Red Cross workers. Speaking to Al Jazeera, the medics said they feared an escalation of the crisis, should these 600 people turn out to be the first of a new wave of African migrants.
“They could be changing their route from Europe and going to America and so we could have a humanitarian crisis if we don’t manage this right,” Luis Jiménez, a Red Cross representative in Paso Canoas, told the TV channel.
But migration experts said that the route was not new, and has long been trod by Africans hoping to reach America.
“It’s nothing to do with the Balkan route becoming harder to take,” Joel Millman, a spokesman for the International Organisation for Migration, said in an interview with the Guardian.
“This phenomenon has been building for years,” Millman added. “The number of Africans making this trip and asking for asylum every year at the US border is in the thousands, so this 600 is just a traffic jam. You see these kind of agglomerations every now and again.”
Africans typically take planes to Ecuador or Brazil, or occasionally stow away inside cargo ships, before making their way up through several countries in Latin America to the US border, where they claim asylum, Millman said.
Members of the stranded group told Al Jazeera they had been travelling for four months and had reached South America by boat. Youleyni, a pregnant woman from the Democratic Republic of Congo, said: “It’s been bad, a lot of police in Colombia, Panama asking for money.”
Costa Rica has typically taken a laissez-faire attitude to migrants crossing its territory, but may have now decided to shift policy because Nicaragua recently began to send people back to Costa Rican soil.
There are now an additional 3,000 Cubans stranded on the Panamanian side of the border, with more expected to arrive.
The Panamanian newspaper La Prensa, reported that at least 700 of the Cubans have started a hunger strike to pressure Costa Rica to open its borders.
The pressure at the border spurred Costa Rican human rights authorities to issue a letter last week calling on other governments in Central America to work to establish a consistent policy on migrants in order to stop these border rushes.
“This is going to continue,” Solano said. “This is not a problem that is going to go away with these specific migrants.”
OVER the past few decades, China’s meteoric rise as Asia’s premier economy has become the overriding framework that locals and international analysts alike use to explain the region. More rarely discussed, though, is how this rapid growth has brought with it the same issues of sustainability and food security that have long plagued economies shifting from an agricultural to an urban industrial base.
Unlike in India, another fast developing nation that has understood the importance advancing traditional industries like agriculture, China has become the world’s largest importer of rice. Therein lies the economic rub.
Beijing’s historic focus on manufacturing as key to commercial domination has ignored the important lessons learned by countries that industrialized in the 19th and 20th centuries. Among the most critical of these is the inevitable migration of labor and the issue of feeding large, centralized populations involved in non-agrarian activities.
An oft-repeated trope states that China has one-fifth of the world’s population, but only seven percent of the world’s arable land, making food security a national obsession. While imported grain ensures there is no immediate threat to the food supply, any step away from self-sufficiency is an ideological blow beneath the belt for Beijing; China’s government has been committed to sustaining a domestic surplus since Chairman Mao’s mishandling of the economy left millions dead from starvation.
As it stands, China still relies on small family holdings to produce much of its food, although it has become patently obvious this traditional model cannot sustainably feed 1.3 billion people. The disconnect is further compounded when those smallholders – upon whom China’s food production depends – move in ever increasing numbers to better paid jobs in the cities. Alongside these issues, China’s manufacturing base is also to blame for pollution and a debilitating impact on land fertility. With intensive damming cutting into the availability of fish as a cheap and plentiful protein source, things look bleak for China’s ability to feed itself.
The government is now asking whether the family-based farming model is up to the task. One alternative would be the system of industrial farms preferred in the U.S., whereby the government instigates non-ownership land acquisitions to create larger and more efficient yields. Another is to continue with smaller landholdings but seek increased productivity through technology, as was done in Japan.
While state policy has favored the smallholding option to date, increasing the food supply from fixed arable areas is a difficult task and entails resorting to agrochemicals and genetically modified crops (GMOs). The Chinese public, however, is massively opposed to GMOs. These fears have been stoked by the People’s Liberation Army’s strategic worries over American imperialism and media speculation on the long-term ill effects widespread GMO consumption might have on public health.
Even if those fears have not been confirmed by scientific data, public sentiment is so overwhelming that it has forced the Communist Party’s hand, one of just a handful of cases where popular pressure has successfully altered CCP policy. As things currently stand, China allows only the import of GMO grains used for animal feed. Human consumption is strictly forbidden.
Or is it?
The Chinese public has long maintained a strongly held belief that GMOs are already widely used in Chinese food. These suspicions were recently confirmed in investigations conducted by Greenpeace. In the Liaoning region – a major part of China’s “breadbasket” – Greenpeace’s discovery of significant proportions of illegal GMO strains have caused considerable concern.
The group’s findings come in tandem with revelations that Chinese nationals have been stealing GMO crop seeds from the U.S., especially in the state of Iowa, to send back to China for research purposes. These seeds are uniformly patented to protect the expensive research investments that go into their development, but China seems determined to skip the costly process of original research.
If seed theft in Iowa reflects small-scale industrial espionage, the planned US$43 billion merger of state-owned ChemChina and Swiss agrochemicals and seeds company Syngenta marks a shift to far larger market acquisitions. Were the ChemChina-Syngenta deal finalized, the group would become the largest agribusiness firm in the world – by a wide margin.
Most importantly for China, ChemChina would gain proprietary information on around 7,000 varieties of GMO seed types, allowing it to skip the equivalent of around eight years of research that would cost an estimated $1.5 billion in costs per annum. If purchasing Syngenta was an attempt to win over the Chinese public, however, Beijing likely miscalculated the mood. Chinese activists havepublicly opposed the merger in an exceedingly rare rebuke of state priorities. U.S. lawmakers and regulators are also threatening to derail the deal, with a group of senators warning that a Chinese-owned Syngenta could threaten US food security. The U.S. government’s Committee on Foreign Investment (CFIUS) is currently reviewing the proposal.
In its attempt to undo the Gordian knot of a growing populace and limited food production, China’s economic planners and agricultural officials seem to have committed to GMOs as the best way out of their predicament. This decision, however, has been taken without the prior knowledge or agreement of a vehemently opposed public. With the economy already in decline, any policies that lead to damaging strikes or protests may prove unwise. By trying to cut through this knot with such a divisive solution, China’s political leaders may well find their blade of choice is double-edged.
2016-04-22
Four children and another individual were hospitalized last night when a jeep belonging to the Additional Secretary of the Disaster Management Ministry K. Amalanadan crashed into a three- wheeler in Chilaw. 
2016-04-22
Four children and another individual were hospitalized last night when a jeep belonging to the Additional Secretary of the Disaster Management Ministry K. Amalanadan crashed into a three- wheeler in Chilaw. 
