'Would-be-dictator' Trump will fail: Soros

Billionaire George Soros calls Donald Trump a "would-be-dictator" and says he is "gearing up for a trade war". Photo: AFP

AFP, Davos- January 20, 2017

Billionaire George Soros on Thursday delivered a scathing assessment of Donald Trump, calling the US President-elect a "would-be-dictator" who is "going to fail".

On the eve of Trump's inauguration in Washington, Soros said Trump was "gearing up for a trade war" which would have "a very far reaching effect in Europe and other parts of the world".

The "would-be-dictator... didn't expect to win, he was surprised," the Hungarian-born financier told an audience of business leaders and journalists at a Hotel in Davos where the World Economic Forum is being held.

"I personally have confidence that he's going to fail... because his ideas, that guide him are inherently self-contradictory," said Soros, adding that members of Trump's cabinet are each fighting for different interests.

But he predicted the loss of the US' "positive influence in the world in favour of an open society", which would have "a very far reaching effect in Europe and other parts of the world".

Soros, who was a supporter of Trump's Democratic rival Hillary Clinton during last year's campaign, lost nearly a billion dollars as a consequence of the rally prompted by Trump’s surprise election victory, according to press reports.

But the positive reaction in financial markets would not last long, Soros predicted, because ultimately they do not like uncertainty.

US stocks retreated and the dollar fell against most currencies Thursday in the final session before Trump's inauguration on Friday.

On Brexit and Theresa May, Soros predicted the British Prime Minister's spell in power would not last long and said the UK population were "in denial" about the financial consequences of leaving the European Union.

"It's unlikely that Prime Minister May is actually going to remain in power," he said.

"At the moment people in the UK are in denial. The current economic situation is not as bad as it was predicted, they live in hope, but as the currency depreciates, and inflation will be the driving force, that will lead to declining living standards.

"It's going to take some time but when it does happen, they will realise that they are earning less than before, because wages won't rise as fast as the cost of living."

Trump Goes to CIA to Attack Media, Lie About Crowd Size, and Suggest Stealing Iraq’s Oil

BY ELIAS GROLL-JANUARY 21, 2017 

On his first full day in office, President Donald Trump traveled to the headquarters of the CIA, where he delivered a blistering attack on the media, lied about the size of his inaugural crowds, toyed with war crimes, and hinted at loosening restraints on U.S. forces fighting Islamist terror groups.

Trump said he chose to make a visit to the CIA his first public event because the media had created the false impression that Trump was in a “feud” with U.S. intelligence agencies. On Saturday, Trump attempted to embrace the intelligence community by delivering a campaign pep rally short on facts and long on vitriol.

“I love you. I respect you,” said the president, who ten days earlier likened U.S. spies to Nazi Germany for their role in publicizing an intel dossier packed with allegations that Russian intelligence services have compromising information on him.

“There is nobody who feels stronger about the intelligence community and the CIA than Donald Trump,”
Trump said, speaking before the wall at CIA headquarters engraved with black stars for the officers who died in the agency’s service. “You’re going to get so much backing that you’re going to say, ‘Please don’t give us so much backing.”

The substance of Trump’s speech focused on the fight against what he called “radical Islamic terrorism,” echoing his inaugural line that it be “eradicated off the face of the earth.” While Trump did not offer any details on how he would do that, he hinted at a more aggressive approach in prosecuting the war on terrorism.

“We have not used the real abilities that we have. We have been restrained. We have to get rid of ISIS. We have no choice,” Trump said. “We’re going to start winning again and you are going to be leading the charge.”

At times, Trump’s remarks veered into political territory unfamiliar to an agency that prides itself on remaining above the partisan fray. He attacked the media, bragged about his election, and bizarrely claimed huge crowds on inauguration day.

White House spokesperson Sean Spicer used his first press statement Saturday to deliver an angry broadside against the media and reports of the inaugural crowd size. “These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong,” he said.

Trump claimed between 1 and 1.5 million attended the inauguration; estimates put it closer to 250,000 attendees.

“I have a running war with the media,” Trump said. “They are among the most dishonest human beings.”

He repeatedly referenced the magnitude of his election victory. “Probably almost everybody in this room voted for me,” Trump said. “We’re all on the same wavelength, folks!”

At one point, Trump regurgitated parts of his stump speech about how the United States “should have kept the oil” after invading Iraq. “Maybe we’ll have another chance,” he added. Aside from being physically impossible to sequester billions of barrels of underground oil, that would constitute a breach of international law. U.S. troops are currently embedded with forces of the country that Trump suggested again invading.

Democrats immediately pounced on the appearance. “After he finished ranting about crowd sizes on on the National Mall, I hope President Trump sat down for an interview with the CIA to help their investigation into his team’s possible collusion with the Kremlin to win the election,” DNC senior adviser Zac Petkanas said in a statement.

In a statement, former CIA Director John Brennan said Trump “should be ashamed of himself.” Brennan said he was “saddened and angered” by what he described as Trump’s “despicable display of self-aggrandizement in front of CIA’s Memorial Wall.”

During his remarks, Trump revealed what appeared to be an abbreviated hiring process for his pick to be CIA director, Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.). Trump claimed he spoke with Pompeo once and was immediately so impressed with him that he cancelled his other interviews for the job.

Speaking in the lobby of the CIA before a crowd of about 300 agency employees — who’d entered a raffle to be able to attend — Trump seemed to cherish his role as a real estate developer more than neophyte commander in chief. He told the group they would need a bigger room for his next visit, and that they should lose Langley’s unsightly columns.

“Maybe it will be built by somebody who knows how to build, and we won’t have columns!” Trump declared.

Olivier Doulier – Pool/Getty Images

The 45th president

What is Donald Trump likely to achieve in power?

Jan 21st 2017

MUCH of the time, argues David Runciman, a British academic, politics matters little to most people. Then, suddenly, it matters all too much. Donald Trump’s term as America’s 45th president, which is due to begin with the inauguration on January 20th, stands to be one of those moments.

It is extraordinary how little American voters and the world at large feel they know about what Mr Trump intends. Those who back him are awaiting the biggest shake-up in Washington, DC, in half a century—though their optimism is an act of faith. Those who oppose him are convinced there will be chaos and ruin on an epoch-changing scale—though their despair is guesswork. All that just about everyone can agree on is that Mr Trump promises to be an entirely new sort of American president. The question is, what sort?

Inside the West Wig

You may be tempted to conclude that it is simply too soon to tell. But there is enough information—from the campaign, the months since his victory and his life as a property developer and entertainer—to take a view of what kind of person Mr Trump is and how he means to fill the office first occupied by George Washington. There is also evidence from the team he has picked, which includes a mix of wealthy businessmen, generals and Republican activists (see Briefing).

For sure, Mr Trump is changeable. He will tell the New York Times that climate change is man-made in one breath and promise coal country that he will reopen its mines in the next. But that does not mean, as some suggest, that you must always shut out what the president says and wait to see what he does. 

When a president speaks, no easy distinction is to be made between word and deed. When Mr Trump says that NATO is obsolete, as he did to two European journalists last week, he makes its obsolescence more likely, even if he takes no action. Moreover, Mr Trump has long held certain beliefs and attitudes that sketch out the lines of a possible presidency. They suggest that the almost boundless Trumpian optimism on display among American businesspeople deserves to be tempered by fears about trade protection and geopolitics, as well as questions about how Mr Trump will run his administration.

Start with the optimism. Since November’s election the S&P500 index is up by 6%, to reach record highs. Surveys show that business confidence has soared. Both reflect hopes that Mr Trump will cut corporate taxes, leading companies to bring foreign profits back home. A boom in domestic spending should follow which, combined with investment in infrastructure and a programme of deregulation, will lift the economy and boost wages.

Done well, tax reform would confer lasting benefits (see Free exchange), as would a thoughtful and carefully designed programme of infrastructure investment and deregulation. But if such programmes are poorly executed, there is the risk of a sugar-rush as capital chases opportunities that do little to enhance the productive potential of the economy.

That is not the only danger. If prices start to rise faster, pressure will mount on the Federal Reserve to increase interest rates. The dollar will soar and countries that have amassed large dollar debts, many of them emerging markets, may well buckle. One way or another, any resulting instability will blow back into America. If the Trump administration reacts to widening trade deficits with extra tariffs and non-tariff barriers, then the instability will only be exacerbated. Should Mr Trump right from the start set out to engage foreign exporters from countries such as China, Germany and Mexico in a conflict over trade, he would do grave harm to the global regime that America itself created after the second world war.

Just as Mr Trump underestimates the fragility of the global economic system, so too does he misread geopolitics. Even before taking office, Mr Trump has hacked away at the decades-old, largely bipartisan cloth of American foreign policy. He has casually disparaged the value of the European Union, which his predecessors always nurtured as a source of stability. He has compared Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor and the closest of allies, unfavourably to Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president and an old foe. He has savaged Mexico, whose prosperity and goodwill matter greatly to America’s southern states. And, most recklessly, he has begun to pull apart America’s carefully stitched dealings with the rising superpower, China—imperilling the most important bilateral relationship of all.

The idea running through Mr Trump’s diplomacy is that relations between states follow the art of the deal. Mr Trump acts as if he can get what he wants from sovereign states by picking fights that he is then willing to settle—at a price, naturally. His mistake is to think that countries are like businesses. In fact, America cannot walk away from China in search of another superpower to deal with over the South China Sea. Doubts that have been sown cannot be uprooted, as if the game had all along been a harmless exercise in price discovery. Alliances that take decades to build can be weakened in months.

Dealings between sovereign states tend towards anarchy—because, ultimately, there is no global government to impose order and no means of coercion but war. For as long as Mr Trump is unravelling the order that America created, and from which it gains so much, he is getting his country a terrible deal.

Hair Force One

Trump’s troops”: A visual guide to the 45th president’s cabinet and senior appointments

So troubling is this prospect that it raises one further question. How will Mr Trump’s White House work? On the one hand you have party stalwarts, including the vice-president, Mike Pence; the chief of staff, Reince Priebus; and congressional Republicans, led by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. On the other are the agitators—particularly Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro and Michael Flynn. The titanic struggle between normal politics and insurgency, mediated by Mr Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, will determine just how revolutionary this presidency is.

As Mr Trump assumes power, the world is on edge. From the Oval Office, presidents can do a modest amount of good. Sadly, they can also do immense harm.

British cops used a Taser on a black man they thought was a robber. He was their race-relations adviser.

By Cleve R. Wootson Jr. January 22 at 9:28 AM

Judah Adunbi has spent the greater part of a decade trying to improve relations between police in southwestern England and the members of his Afro-Caribbean community.

Still, all the advocacy and the meetings with police were ineffective in getting the 63-year-old dreadlocked man out of the predicament he was in earlier this month — staring at the business end of a police officer's Taser.

Adunbi had been out walking his dog in Bristol, about 120 miles west of London, when officers mistook him for a robbery suspect, according to the Guardian. They didn't know him — or that he was a founding member of the police department's Independent Advisory Group, an organization formed to improve police-community relations.

The officers asked his name but, agitated, Adunbi refused to tell them.

“I've done no wrong,” he said, the entire incident captured by a neighbor who started filming. “Leave me alone.”

He does make an effort to show he's not a threat. When an officer says he's holding his keys in a threatening manner, he puts his hands over his head, then clasps his arms behind his back. Still, the confrontation intensifies.

“I've asked you to remain calm,” an officer asks.

“Your sergeant is going to Taser me for whatever reason,” Adunbi says, his incredulity mixing in with a thick Caribbean accent.

His entreaties are not enough. When Adunbi tries to go into his home, the officers stop him at the gate. A struggle ensues, and an officer pulls out a black and yellow stun gun.

She pulls the trigger and yells “Taser” three times.

[Video: He was naked, unarmed and tripping on LSD. Police ordered their K-9 to attack him.]

A prong strikes Adunbi just below the chin, sending 50,000 volts through his body. He falls to the ground, now paralyzed, his head striking the pavement.

“All right, you're being Tasered. Okay, you're under arrest.”

When he was taken to the hospital, the wire from the Taser still dangled from his face.

In Britain, handguns and assault rifles are effectively banned for civilians. Only a few, well-trained officers are entrusted with guns — and they hardly ever use them, according to The Washington Post's Griff Witte.

Between 2004 and 2013, officers in Britain and Wales discharged their firearms fewer than 10 times a year, Witte reported. (In the United States, 963 people were shot and killed by police in 2016, according to The Washington Post's Fatal Force database. Of those, 233 were black.)

Still, British authorities found that officers are more likely to use force against blacks and other minorities. According to the Guardian, black people are three times as likely as white people to be shocked with a stun gun by British police.

In Britain, incidents involving the use of force can be referred to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, which handles the complaints and compiles data. The IPCC found that uses of force against blacks and other minorities accounted for 29 percent of its referrals in the past five years, although that group accounts for just 14 percent of the British population.

One of the ways authorities sought to eradicate those disparities was by forming Independent Advisory Groups.

In Bristol, Adunbi had been a founding member.

The group's mission is to advise officers “on policing issues that may cause concern to local people and communities,” according to the Association of Chief Police officers. In particular, police familiarize members of the IAG with protocols for when officers use force.

“To know that one of the [founding] members of the Independent Advisory Group, which was created some years ago to improve the relationship between the Afro-Caribbean community and the constabulary, and to be treated like this, it’s difficult,” Adunbi told the Guardian.

He was charged with assaulting a constable in the execution of duty and using threatening or abusing behavior, according to the Telegraph. The charges have been dropped.

Avon & Somerset Constabulary. (Photo courtesy of Avon & Somerset Constabulary.)

In a statement, Chief Police Superintendent Jon Reilly said the incident has been referred to the Independent Police Complaints Commission. Doing so is not a requirement, Reilly said, but “we want to be as open and transparent as possible.”

Reilly said he had met with Adunbi and the two “had a constructive conversation.”

“We’re aware of concerns within the local community, and we take these concerns very seriously. We would like to answer their questions, but we need to be mindful that an investigation is ongoing, which makes that difficult.

[A black woman was accused of stealing — so this Victoria’s Secret kicked out all black customers]

“However, I would like to reassure them that the incident was captured on the officers’ Body Worn Video cameras.”

Adunbi told the Guardian that he had gone through a similar ordeal with police in 2007, another case of mistaken identity. Police confirmed to the newspaper that Adunbi had been “awarded compensation” after an incident with officers.

A Facebook group has already sprouted called “Prosecute Judah Adunbi Attackers.”

Venezuela's Maduro has asked central bank head to step down - sources

Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro talks to the media during a news conference at Miraflores Palace in Caracas, Venezuela January 18, 2017. REUTERS/Marco Bello/Files

By Ana Isabel Martinez and Alexandra Ulmer- Sat Jan 21, 2017

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Friday asked central bank head Nelson Merentes to step down, two sources close to the matter told Reuters.

"The request for him to step down was made this afternoon," said one of the sources linked to the government.

It was not immediately clear why Merentes, a mathematician by training who has led the bank since 2009 except during a stint as Finance Minister in 2013, was asked to leave or who might replace him. Venezuela's central bank and Information Ministry did not immediately respond to a request forcomment.

Oil-rich Venezuela is in the throes of a brutal economic crisis. Consumer prices rose 800 percent in 2016 while the economy contracted by 18.6 percent, Reuters reported earlier on Friday, citing previously undisclosed central bank figures.

As Venezuela's economy has tanked, the central bank has stopped releasing quarterly and monthly economic indicators.

Long seen as a pragmatic figure, Merentes, who completed a PhD. in mathematics in Budapest in 1991 before returning to Venezuela as a university professor, has disappointed economists by not pushing through major reforms in the Socialist-led OPEC country.

Analysts say Venezuela's floundering economy will not return to growth until it lifts corruption-riddled exchange controls and dysfunctional price control system, and rolls back hundreds of nationalizations that have left many industries unproductive.

(Additional reporting by Corina Pons; Editing by Shri Navaratnam)

Text alert scheme will ensure families in India get the message on organ donation

Awareness campaign aims to stop trafficking and black market trade in body parts by reminding doctors to ask bereaved families about organ donation

India hopes to reduce transplant waiting times and deal a blow to the illegal organ trade by encouraging 300,000 doctors to ask families about organ donation. Photograph: Adnan Abidi/Reuters

Roli Srivastava in Mumbai for Thomson Reuters Foundation, part of the Guardian development network-Friday 20 January 2017

Doctors in India are to get text alerts reminding them to ask families to donate the organs of deceased loved ones as part of a campaign to solve the country’s organ shortage, which has fuelled a black market trade.

The drive, “Poochna mat bhoolo” – “Don’t forget to ask” in Hindi – will target 300,000 doctors. It represents the latest in a string of awareness campaigns in India after a kidney racket involving a poor woman was uncovered at a top Mumbai hospital last year.

According to government data, up to 200,000 people are on the waiting list for kidneys in India while 25-30,000 are currently awaiting a liver. Legal donations meet about 3% to 5% of the demand.

“Families don’t remember to donate organs when a loved one dies, or it’s too late by the time they do. So we are reminding doctors to speak to them immediately after a death,” said Krishan Kumar Aggarwal, president of the Indian Medical Association, which launched the drive. “Human trafficking for organs will stop if cadaver organ donations pick up.”

Commercial trade in organs is illegal in India. Donations to a patient by a close relative are allowed but fewoccur. In desperation, some patients on the waiting list seek the services of middlemen to procure organs for money.

The middlemen scout villages for potential donors, whom they sometimes lure with money and false promises of a job.

“Organ failures are commonly caused by lifestyle diseases and most often affect the rich, which leads to the possibility of exploitation of the poor,” said Anil Kumar, who heads India’s organ transplant programme.

Kumar’s department has been alerted to various forms of organ trade – from advertisements on websites offering money to donors, to kidnappings for organs, as well as people from Nepal trying to sell organs in India to rebuild their homes after the earthquake.

Campaigners say the organ supply-demand gap can be bridged if doctors, particularly those working in the intensive care units of major hospitals, are sensitised to counsel families to donate organs.

They say the “Poochna mat bhoolo” campaign is critical as it means that doctors speak directly to families, eliminating middlemen. As well as texts to doctors, posters will be put up in hospitals to remind doctors to ask the donation question.

SLWJA AND FMM ORGANISE EVENTS TO MARK BLACK JANUARY OF MEDIA FREEDOM OF SRI LANKA

21/01/2017

The Sri Lanka Working Journalists’ Association (SLWJA) will launch a campaign to send postcards to President Maithripala Sirisena, requesting the appointment of a Presidential Commission to investigate murders, assaults and abductions of journalists, as well as attacks on media institutions.

The campaign will kickoff at 11 am next Tuesday (24) at the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute.

The postcards will be posted with ideas and signatures of political party representatives, civil society activists, trade unionists, journalists and editors.

On January 26, last year, activists had forwarded a letter to President Sirisena, urging him to appoint a Presidential Commission to conduct speedy investigations to locate culprits who attacked journalists.

The SLWJA said that, though a year has now passed since the letter was sent to the President, they were yet to receive a response. As such, a fresh campaign will be launched to draw attention to the issue.

– Sunday Times

Meanwhile the Free Media Movement has organized a vigil event to commemorate the comrades who sacrificed their lives in order to safeguard the freedom of expression and to demand justice for them. The theme of the 2017 is “Two Years of Good Governance – January is Still Black..!”. The vigil will be held on 24th January (Tuesday) 2017 at 6 pm at the Independence Square, Colombo 07.

Democracy, Secularism & National Reconciliation

By S. Pathmanathan –January 21, 2017 

The fate of the programme of national reconciliation hangs on the capacity of the government to implement the resolution of the U. N. Human Rights Commission, of which Sri Lanka was a sponsor. A Charismatic and strong leadership endowed with maturity of wisdom and enriched with enlightenment is the need of the hour to usher in a new era of hope, co-existence, harmony and unity.

By S. Pathmanathan – Professor Emeritus in History at Peradeniya, Former UGC Vice Chairman, and Chancellor of University of Jaffna

Presented by: Prof. S. Ratnajeevan H. Hoole at the public meeting on the theme of Secularism titled “An Evening with Shri Navin B. Chawla on Mother Teresa, Now Saint Teresa of Calcutta”

Photo -L to R; Shri Navin Chawla, The Ven. Sam Ponniah, Prof. S.R.H. Hoole, The Rt. Rev. J.B. Gnanapragasam, Dr. Dushyanthi Hoole, Hon. R. Sampanthan, HE A.Natarajan

Madame Chairman, Shri Navin Chawla, My Lord Bishop, The Honourable R. Sampanthan, Your Excellency A. Natarajan, Reverend Sirs, Sisters in Holy Orders, Distinguished Mesdames et Messieurs: Good afternoon.

I am deeply humbled that Prof. Pathmanathan has chosen me to read his talk. I am gratified not least because our thinking is very much aligned, and I am able to endorse everything he says here. Without further ado, let me turn to Professor Pathmanathan’s weighty thoughts of great relevance today as the role of religion in our proposed new constitution is debated.

Democracy and Secularism, as conceived presently in the South Asian context, have their origins in the colonial past, particularly under Pax Britannica. They are so interconnected that one cannot speak about either without reference to the other. The theory and practice of democracy have a long history. They had their origins in the ancient Greek civilization. At least once in a lifetime a free Greek citizen was expected to participate in the process of decision-making in the affairs of government. This was possible in the small Greek republics spread over the Mediterranean world.

Chancellor S. Pathmanathan

The Greek conception of democracy has caught the imagination of political theorists and intellectuals in the medieval ages in Europe. It became the source of inspiration for the struggle against tyranny and despotism. Democracy had the promise of redemption from arbitrary exercise of power and authority and establishing a commonwealth of citizens in the form of a state with equality for all, and where the laws were supreme.

Political theory in relation to democracy was elaborated and refined with intellectual vigour by John Locke, Thomas Jefferson and Jean Jacqes Rousseau and a host of others. Rousseau made the people supreme and the state an instrument of their will. The Sri Lankan experience has to be examined against this background.

As in India and many other parts of the British empire, Democracy has been a transplant and sometimes without any consideration for the local environment. The scope of British democracy was also limited. They imposed a highly centralized system of administration and passed it over to the parliament of Sri Lanka in 1947. It had a great opportunity to foster and develop the traditions of harmony and co-existence among the principal communities, the Sinhalese and Tamils. However, the developments were in the reverse direction. The deficiency in the constitution and the political opportunism of those who sought to achieve power and retain it were among the combination of factors that led to this development.

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Development journalism 

by Sanjana Hattotuwa-January 21, 2017, 4:53 pm 

 

Earlier this week I took part in a two-hour live TV programme on ITN, in Sinhala, around why a development project like the Moragahakanda Reservoir didn’t get much media coverage. The choice of a project to anchor the programme to was interesting. The foundation stone for the project was laid in January 2007 by the current President, who was then a Cabinet Minister under the government of Mahinda Rajapaksa. President Sirisena is on record how after the inauguration of the project ten years ago, moves by Mahinda Rajapaksa to strip him of key Ministries sowed the seed of his dissent, leading to the political dynamics of today. Moragahakanda is a pet project of the incumbent President, championed for a decade. The desire of both station and the specific programme may have been to prop the project as one worthy of greater mainstream media coverage.

However, fellow panellist and media commentator Nalaka Gunawardene threw back at anchor a pertinent question – poor coverage relative to what? In the decade between 2005 and 2015, every drain, doorway and culvert opened, leave aside highway, port or airport, resulted in a flurry of media coverage and attention. Just after 2009, the project of deifying the Rajapaksas included sustained coverage on anything and everything they attended and cut a ribbon for – whether it was of any consequence or not. From pillars and lampposts to front-pages and TV news, from full colour, full page advertisements in the print media to the adroit use of social media, the grand narrative of development and prosperity was strategically produced and published to counter justice, reconciliation and accountability.

It worked.

Yahapalanaya promised to change all that. What is perhaps an unintended consequence, though not entirely surprising to some, is that the current government just doesn’t know how to sell itself. On the one hand, it cannot visibly use the State media in much the same way as the previous administration. It doesn’t have comparable levels of charisma amongst the political leadership. The once powerful story of a democratic, peaceful shift away from authoritarianism is now lost, largely because government didn’t know how to run with it over the longer-term. The media story today is one anchored to the failure of government to achieve and sustain meaningful reform. Given the circus of media coverage over the past decade, both Sirisena and Wickremesinghe may in fact be desperate to effectively tell an apathetic public that it is doing lots of interesting stuff. Desperation is a bad basis for strategy. This isn’t going to end well.

For starters, Moragahakanda and similar projects undertaken from 2005 onwards have an associated debt that isn’t clear or always in the public domain. A demographic between 18 – 34, first time voters and more generally engaged in socio-political discussions over social media, aren’t those tuning into ITN or going to websites run by government ministries. Given the debacle of being outed for peddling outright lies regarding investments by Volkswagen in Sri Lanka, plus the largely negative media publicity around the Hambantota economic zone (to the credit of the JO and the Rajapaksas, who played their hand very well) we have now a government is desperate for positive spin and favourable coverage.

The ITN programme may have been thought of as a way to place on record, through State media, the importance of one project and the scale of its returns over the next years. There is, to the credit of the gentlemen who appeared on behalf of the project and no doubt deeply committed to it, a lot (of very good things) that the media should have covered about Moragahakanda, but have not. Coverage, as it is always the case, is limited to the President’s comments and his visit. The cure though is not through official propaganda. My submission was three-fold, though it is unlikely to gain traction in government.

One - focus on the millennials, using social media as the primary vector. Inheriting debt is no cause for joy, and the debt portfolio of Sri Lanka being what it is, youth today may well wonder why they should be interested in much less cheering for projects, hundreds of kilometres away from them, with no visible benefit to their lives and yet had to pay for through taxes. A recent multi-media campaign by the Office for National Unity and Reconciliation (ONUR) –the marketing equivalent of rigor mortis - shows how poorly even the more progressive arms of government really understand communicating with a key demographic that placed them in power. Conversely, the focus on Facebook and Twitter Q&As by Mahinda and Namal Rajapaksa, just over the first weeks of 2017, suggest they are far more in tune with how this demographic engages, accesses news and information and makes up their minds. In a post-truth political and media landscape, those who are often first to screens are also those who shape minds the most, independent of factual merit. A government that doesn’t have the institutional agility, imaginative capacity, foresight and indeed, humour to appeal to a key political constituency, spread across the island, is not one whose long-term success can be bet on.

Two – data: lots of it, in raw form and in the public domain. Government sponsored news and information is precisely that. Propaganda done right is what the JO and Rajapaksas were, nay are good at. Compelling stories, virally distributed, can entertain, shift focus on to or away from key issues – which as much as it can be a force for change, is often used to gloss over inconvenient truths. Data around projects, from design to implementation, anchored to tenders, procedures, projected costs, cost over-runs, yield, return of investment, benefits, risks, opportunities and challenges can contribute to a culture where citizens, communities and media use what’s in the public domain to hold government accountable. In raw form – also sometimes called machine-readable form – this data can contribute to citizen driven socio-economic modelling, visualisations that simplify complexity and data-driven stories that through production and publication can strengthen governance and accountability. The shift from propaganda – or State led media initiatives – to a data driven media production culture is not just symbolic. Substantively, the debate when anchored to public data is around facts and figures, and much less about spin and opinion. Everyone, including government, stands to benefit from this.

Three - an inquiring mind and openly questioning; I had the mission statement of The Economist magazine in mind when I proposed this on TV. On the contents page of every issue, though rarely noticed even by long-time subscribers, the magazine says it was established to take part in ‘a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress’. Infusing this spirit into the quality of media production and publication around governance is a good thing. Towards the end of the programme, this scared the anchor who thought I may have been asking citizens to rebel and revolt on the streets. While this too is a feature of democracy, what I stressed more on-air was what our existing education system stymies from kindergarten onwards – independent, critical thought. A clash of ideas was what I wanted to see. Good journalism that looks at development is nothing more than a set of questions framing an issue, place, person or process. It pits ideas against each other.

It is unclear if ITN itself understood the thrust of these three points, much less government. We seem to be stuck in a groove where personal cults, sycophancy, uncritical media and the worst sort of propaganda go on to define how we see, and appreciate, much of what is done with our money and in our name. The best form of coverage a government can get is through the interest of citizens to question it hard, and over the long-term.

Yet that’s precisely the currency so many in politics fear.

Right to Information Dead on Arrival at UN

By Thalif Deen-21/01/2017

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 19 2017 (IPS) - The 193-member UN General Assembly has been dragging its feet on a proposal that has been kicked around the corridors of the United Nations for over 10 years: a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) providing journalists the “right to information” in a sprawling bureaucracy protective of its turf.

Ironically, nearly 100 countries – all of them UN member states – have approved some form of national legislation recognizing the right to information (RTI) within their own borders but still seem unenthusiastic in extending it to the press corps at the United Nations.

The US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which dates back to 1967, has provided the public and the press the right to request access to records from any federal agency—and has been described as “the law that keeps citizens in the know about their government”.

In the US, federal agencies are required to disclose any information requested under the FOIA unless it falls under one of nine exemptions which protect interests such as personal privacy, national security, and law enforcement.

In Australia, the legislation is known as Right2Know; in Bangladesh, the Right to Information (RTI) Resources Centre provides resources for those seeking to file a request with government agencies; in Japan, the Citizens’ Centre for Information Disclosure offers help to those interested in filing requests; in India, the Right to Information: a Citizen Gateway is the portal for RTI; Canada’s Access to Information Act came into force in 1983 and Kenya’s Access to Information Act was adopted in August 2016, according to the Centre for Law and Democracy (CLD).

The strongest law among the new countries on the RTI Rating is that of Sri Lanka, which scores 121 points, putting the country in 9th place globally, says CLD.

The passage of this law means that every country in South Asia apart from Bhutan now has an RTI law. The region is generally a strong performer, with every country scoring over 100 points except Pakistan, which continues to languish near the bottom of the rating, according to CLD.

And Sweden’s Freedom of the Press Act of 1766 has been described as the “oldest in the world.”

Samir Sanbar, a former UN Assistant Secretary-General who headed the Department of Public Information (DPI), which provides media accreditation and doles out free office space to UN-based journalists, told IPS the right to information is an integral part of U.N. principles.

But providing that right—even the basic information available in the public domain– has been stymied both by member states and the UN bureaucracy, he added.

He pointed out that the need to “inform the peoples” of the United Nations is implicitly indicated in the Charter.

But implementing it was “a basic issue I had experienced throughout my work, with both certain government officials– including those publicly claiming open channels– and many senior U.N. Secretariat colleagues”.

Those who believed “Information is Power” were very hesitant, to what they perceived was sharing their authority with a wider public, said Sanbar who served under five different UN Secretaries-General.

“It was most evident that when I launched the now uncontested website www.un.org, a number of powerful Under-Secretaries-General (USGs) and Permanent Representatives cautioned me against “telling everyone what was happening” (in the UN system) and refused to authorize any funds.”

“I had to raise a team of DPI volunteers in my office, operating from within the existing budget, to go ahead and eventually offer computers loaned from an outside source, to certain delegations to realize it was more convenient for them to access news releases than having to send one of their staffers daily to the building to collect material from the third floor.“

Eventually, everyone joined in, and the site is now recognized as one of the ten best official sites worldwide.

“We had a similar difficulty in prodding for International World Press Freedom Day through the General Assembly. It seems that even those with the best of intentions– since delegates represent official governments that view free press with cautious monitoring– are usually weary of opening a potentially vulnerable issue,” said Sanbar, author of the recently-released “Inside the U.N. in a Leaderless World’.

Matthew Lee, an investigative UN-based journalist who has been pursuing the story for over 10 years, told IPS he has been virtually fighting a losing battle.

“When I first got to the UN in late 2005, I noticed there was no FOIA. After asking around about it, I got then Under-Secretary-General (USG) for Management, Christopher Burnham, to say he would work on it. But he left. So I asked his replacement at Under-Secretary-General, Alicia Barcena, who said she would work on it. She never did.”

The UN Secretariat, he said, has continued to blame the General Assembly. But the Secretariat could easily adopt its own policy, for example, to disclose who pays for UN Secretary-General’s travel.

Asked about the FOIA, UN deputy spokesperson Farhan Haq told IPS last year: “The secretary-general supports the idea of transparency. But this would be an issue for member states.”
Barbara Crossette, a former UN Bureau Chief for the New York Times and currently contributing editor and writer for PassBlue, an online publication covering the UN, told IPS: “I think you are right, to be sceptical about getting anything like this through the General Assembly. Or for that matter that the Security Council would be cooperative, if asked for information.”

As you would know, a lot of people who have worked in DPI see the General Assembly – and the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions (ACABQ) in particular — as loathe to promote the sharing of information, even in the current setup, and assume that not enough countries would back making access to it a right, she noted.

“A FOIA would be a godsend to would-be spies. And how would it be legally crafted, I wonder?. It would be interesting to know if places like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have these policies.”

The new Secretary–General Antonio Guterres’ team “is supposed to be writing a new communications policy for the UN — making it more open and effective in outreach generally. But I don’t know if that will include journalists.”

In one of her recent pieces in PassBlue, Crossette said the DPI is also completely hamstrung by its mandate, officials acknowledge, and the head of the office, who ranks as Under Secretary-General, is not chosen primarily for his or her media skills, but is often a political appointee with little or no journalism experience.

He or she must work under tight budgetary conditions deliberately framed to not give the department the tools it needs, she added.

Sinha Ratnatunga, editor-in- chief of the Sunday Times, a major weekly newspaper in Sri Lanka, told IPS the RTI law was passed by parliament last June; signed into law by the Speaker in August and becomes operational on February 4 (independence Day).

“However, there is a provision to ‘stagger’ its implementation if the government isn’t ready”, he pointed out.

“In any event the law must be operational whether the government is ready or not by August 4 (one year after the Speaker signed it into law). But the government is rather silent on how prepared they are for February 4 which is hardly a fortnight or so away”, said Ratnatunga , Deputy Chairman, of the Sri Lanka Press Institute and Board Member of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN-IFRA).

He said the law is pretty progressive but many people, including journalists “are pretty clueless about its power and reach and what difference it can make to empowering citizens and journalists in the quest of good governance.”

He said there’s a whole exercise of educating public servants, appointing Information Officers, educating the journalists and the citizenry ahead.

“Yes, the law took 12 plus years in the making, but the most difficult process of educating the country on the potential of the law lies ahead.”

“Hopefully, the media will play the role of whistleblower, but fewer journalists are now interested in investigative journalism; so we have to wait and see if all the trouble in bringing the law was worth it, after all,” he declared.

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com