Weerawansa who is always after illicit filthy lucre tried to commit suicide even over illicit love..!

-Letter written in his own handwriting ….

(Lanka-e-News - 28.March.2017, 9.45AM)  Ex minister Weerasangili

Panikiyage Wimalasena alias Wimalasiri Gamlath alias Wimal Weerawansa the notorious fraudster currently in remand custody over misappropriation of Rs.90 million or more of public funds and other grave charges  , and who is supposedly trying to stage a fast unto death , better described as Lemon Puff fast 2 because he is truly pulling a fast one , has even several years ago tried this same suicide trick and gimmick . We publish herein a copy of the letter received by Lanka e news written in his own handwriting sent by him to Sashi Weerawansa .

Unfortunately a copy of this letter that was in our library was destroyed when our Lanka e news portal was  set on fire. However in response to our request made yesterday , a  number of our viewers had sent that letter copy.

The letter reads thus :

My dear Sashi,

Please pardon me. Because you are not giving me an opportunity to rectify myself and go forward into the future , I do not wish to live any more.

Please forgive  me  … Wish you a bright future. Please look after the two children on my behalf. I love the small daughter and son a lot. I am sorry . But there is nothing that I can do. 

Please forgive me..

Gam’

Weerawansa had signed this letter in the name of  “Gam’ because at that time in keeping with his faceless character  he was going by the name of Wimalasiri Gamlath also.

Poor Weerawansa has via this letter asked for forgiveness and admitted to have committed an unpardonable  wrong . This wrong referred  to was  an illicit  sexual relationship while having two children , and Sashi getting wind of it.  His asking for pardon on three occasions in that short letter alone proves what a grave and grievous wrong he has committed.

No  sooner Sashi saw  this letter than she  sent a fax message to the office of the JVP to which party he belonged at that time. The JVP leaders taking swift action had sent a group to Weerawansa’s house , and managed to rescue moronic   suicide maniac Weerawansa.  We shall in a subsequent report reveal how the latter showed his ‘gratitude’ to those who saved his life !

Going by this record , his present attempt to commit suicide too  may be  because his conscience is so  guilt ridden as before , and the heinous crimes  he committed in the past are haunting and preying on him . Perhaps his aim is to commit suicide before the courts can mete out punishment to him , and thereby portray himself as  ‘hero who fasted unto death’ and suppress all his perfidies  with a view to deceive the masses , in the same way as he has been  duping the people all along via trickeries and treacheries.

It is a well and widely known fact Weerawansa is not only a fraud but also a coward who cannot face the people under his true name. This is why from time to time he had been using various names and various passports under different names. Such racketeers rob public funds and assets to decorate themselves with  false ostentation including  counterfeit fame  , as well as  to cover up their acute inferiority complex ,while  living  a life of deceit and debauchery.

On the contrary , if he truly had any sincere intention to prove to the people he is truthful , and  live a life of an honest and virtuous  politico  , he had enough opportunities and time to  resolve the housing problems of the people during the ten long years he was the minister of housing. Yet , instead of solving the issues of the people who  helped him to become a minister  , he distributed the houses meant for the people and built out of their funds ,to his relatives unlawfully for cheap prices .  In addition he distributed 40  official vehicles of the State to his relatives , cronies and henchmen as if  those belonged to his dowry property.

What’s more ! he built a mansion for his wife out of robbed public funds. Now ,when these are being exposed ,this uneducated cowardly  crook who is suffering  from inferiority complex ,  unable to face the people and the voters he cheated wholesale , trying   to commit suicide is not a matter for surprise. 

The letter of attempted suicide of Weerawansa addressed to Sashi was first published by Late Lasantha Wickremetunge , the Sunday Leader editor in June 2008 . It appeared in the Irudhina the Sinhala counterpart of Leader. Weerawansa the grade nine qualified moron was so vengeful and heartless towards Late Lasantha, that when he was questioned by a journalist at  a media  briefing after the murder of Lasantha committed by the very government of moronic  suicide maniac Weerawansa , the latter in turn disdainfully inquired ‘ Who is this Lasantha?’

 ( Our effusive thanks to viewers Sampath, Manjula, Sarath, Nishantha  and  Sena who responded to our request ) 

The image herein can be viewed after magnification by  clicking  hereunder …

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by     (2017-03-28 04:25:39)

THE BEST JOB IN THE WORLD: GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ ON JOURNALISM

Image: Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

28/03/2017

Some 50 years ago, there were no schools of journalism. One learned  the trade in the newsroom, in the print shops, in the local cafe and in Friday-night hangouts. The entire newspaper was a factory where journalists were made and the news was printed without quibbles. We journalists always hung together, we had a life in common and were so passionate about our work that we didn’t talk about anything else. 

The work promoted strong friendships among the group, which left little room for a personal life.There were no scheduled editorial meetings, but every afternoon at 5pm, the entire newspaper met for an unofficial coffee break somewhere in the newsroom, and took a breather from the daily tensions. It was an open discussion where we reviewed the hot themes of the day in each section of the newspaper and gave the final touches to the next day’s edition.

The newspaper was then divided into three large departments: news, features and editorial. The most prestigious and sensitive was the editorial department; a reporter was at the bottom of the heap, somewhere between an intern and a gopher. Time and the profession itself has proved that the nerve centre of journalism functions the other way. At the age of 19 I began a career as an editorial writer and slowly climbed the career ladder through hard work to the top position of cub reporter.

Then came schools of journalism and the arrival of technology. The graduates from the former arrived with little knowledge of grammar and syntax, difficulty in understanding concepts of any complexity and a dangerous misunderstanding of the profession in which the importance of a “scoop” at any price overrode all ethical considerations.

The profession, it seems, did not evolve as quickly as its instruments of work. Journalists were lost in a labyrinth of technology madly rushing the profession into the future without any control. In other words: the newspaper business has involved itself in furious competition for material modernisation, leaving behind the training of its foot soldiers, the reporters, and abandoning the old mechanisms of participation that strengthened the professional spirit. Newsrooms have become a sceptic laboratories for solitary travellers, where it seems easier to communicate with extraterrestrial phenomena than with readers’ hearts. The dehumanisation is galloping.

Before the teletype and the telex were invented, a man with a vocation for martyrdom would monitor the radio, capturing from the air the news of the world from what seemed little more than extraterrestrial whistles.  A well-informed writer would piece the fragments together, adding background and other relevant details as if reconstructing the skeleton of a dinosaur from a single vertebra. Only editorialising was forbidden, because that was the sacred right of the newspaper’s publisher, whose editorials, everyone assumed, were written by him, even if they weren’t, and were always written in impenetrable and labyrinthine prose, which, so history relates, were then unravelled by the publisher’s personal typesetter often hired for that express purpose.

Today fact and opinion have become entangled: there is comment in news reporting; the editorial is enriched with facts. The end product is none the better for it and never before has the profession been more dangerous. Unwitting or deliberate mistakes, malign manipulations and poisonous distortions can turn a news item into a dangerous weapon.

Quotes from “informed sources” or “government officials” who ask to remain anonymous, or by observers who know everything and whom nobody knows, cover up all manner of violations that go unpunished.But the guilty party holds on to his right not to reveal his source, without asking himself whether he is a gullible tool of the source,manipulated into passing on the information in the form chosen by his source. I believe bad journalists cherish their source as their own life – especially if it is an official source – endow it with a mythical quality, protect it, nurture it and ultimately develop a dangerous complicity with it that leads them to reject the need for a second source.

At the risk of becoming anecdotal, I believe that another guilty party in this drama is the tape recorder. Before it was invented, the job was done well with only three elements of work: the notebook, foolproof ethics and a pair of ears with which we reporters listened to what the sources were telling us. The professional and ethical manual for the tape recorder has not been invented yet. Somebody needs to teach young reporters that the recorder is not a substitute for the memory, but a simple evolved version of the serviceable, old-fashioned notebook.

The tape recorder listens, repeats – like a digital parrot – but it does not think; it is loyal, but it does not have a heart; and, in the end, the literal version it will have captured will never be as trustworthy as that kept by the journalist who pays attention to the real words of the interlocutor and, at the same time, evaluates and qualifies them from his knowledge and experience.

The tape recorder is entirely to blame for the undue importance now attached to the interview. Given the nature of radio and television, it is only to be expected that it became their mainstay. Now even the print media seems to share the erroneous idea that the voice of truth is not that of the journalist but of the interviewee. Maybe the solution is to return to the lowly little notebook so the journalist can edit intelligently as he listens, and relegate the tape recorder to its real role as invaluable witness.

It is some comfort to believe that ethical transgressions and other problems that degrade and embarrass today’s journalism are not always the result of immorality, but also stem from the lack of professional skill. Perhaps the misfortune of schools of journalism is that while they do teach some useful tricks of the trade, they teach little about the profession itself. Any training in schools of journalism must be based on three fundamental principles: first and foremost, there must be aptitude and talent; then the knowledge that “investigative” journalism is not something special, but that all journalism must, by definition, be investigative; and, third, the awareness that ethics are not merely an occasional condition of the trade, but an integral part, as essentially a part of each other as the buzz and the horsefly.

The final objective of any journalism school should, nevertheless, be to return to basic training on the job and to restore journalism to its original public service function; to reinvent those passionate daily 5pm informal coffee-break seminars of the old newspaper office.

– This is the third in a series of articles exploring media freedom drawn from the archives of Index on Censorship magazine. Writing in 1997, the late Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez discussed the evolution of journalism. Before gaining worldwide acclaim for novels including One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, Márquez was a journalist for newspapers in Colombia and Venezuela. This piece shares his love of the profession and his concern that reporters have become “lost in labyrinth of technology madly rushing the profession into the future without any control”

– indexoncensorship

Israel delays cancer treatment for Gaza children

White phosphorous munitions are destroyed in the southern Gaza Strip during a controlled demolition in March 2010. There are concerns that such Israeli weaponry has contributed to a spike in cancer rates in the territory.Yousef DeebAPA images

Sarah Algherbawi-28 March 2017

Jihad is a boy with ambitions. “I want to grow until I become an astronaut and an engineer,” the 9-year-old said. “At the same time.”

Israel delays cancer treatment for Gaza children.docx by Thavam Ratna on Scribd

So far, yet so near: Palestinians in Chile defend their homeland

Lawyers for the Chilean Palestinian Federation have used universal jurisdiction to file a case against Israeli judges

The Cremisan valley in the occupied West Bank (Photo courtesy of the Palestinian Federation of Chile)

Angeles Rodenas-Tuesday 28 March 2017 

SANTIAGO - Though the Palestinian Club in Santiago de Chile is around 14,000 kilometres away from the West Bank, the plight of the Palestinian people is far from a distant memory for the Chilean Palestinian community using its complex of sports facilities, recreational grounds and conference rooms.

So far, yet so near Palestinians in Chile defend their homeland.docx by Thavam Ratna on Scribd

China: Military infrastructure in Spratly’s can deploy warplanes

Construction is shown on Subi Reef, in the Spratly Islands, the disputed South China Sea in this March 14, 2017 satellite image released by CSIS Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) to Reuters on March 27, 2017. Source: CSIS/AMTI DigitalGlobe/Handout via Reuters

28th March 2017

CHINA appears to have largely completed major construction of military infrastructure on artificial islands it has built in the South China Sea and can now deploy combat planes and other military hardware there at any time, a US think tank said on Monday.

The Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI), part of Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the work on Fiery Cross, Subi and Mischief Reefs in the Spratly Islands included naval, air, radar and defensive facilities.

The think tank cited satellite images taken this month, which its director, Greg Poling, said showed new radar antennas on Fiery Cross and Subi.

“So look for deployments in the near future,” he said.

SEE ALSO: China: South China Sea facilities for civilian, not military use – Premier Li

China has denied US charges that it is militarizing the South China Sea, although last week Premier Li Keqiang said defense equipment had been placed on islands in the disputed waterway to maintain “freedom of navigation.”

Construction is shown on Fiery Cross Reef, in the Spratly Islands, the disputed South China Sea in this March 9, 2017 satellite image released by CSIS Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) to Reuters on March 27, 2017. Source: CSIS/AMTI DigitalGlobe/Handout via Reuters

A Pentagon spokesman, Commander Gary Ross, declined to comment on the specifics of the AMTI report, saying it was not the Defense Department’s practice to comment on intelligence.

But he said that “China‘s continued construction in the South China Sea is part of a growing body of evidence that they continue to take unilateral actions which are increasing tensions in the region and are counterproductive to the peaceful resolution of disputes.”

AMTI said China‘s three air bases in the Spratlys and another on Woody Island in the Paracel chain further north would allow its military aircraft to operate over nearly the entire South ChinaSea, a key global trade route that Beijing claims most of.

Several neighboring states have competing claims in the sea, which is widely seen as a potential regional flashpoint.

The think tank said advanced surveillance and early-warning radar facilities at Fiery Cross, Subi and Cuarteron Reefs, as well as Woody Island, and smaller facilities elsewhere gave it similar radar coverage.

It said China had installed HQ-9 surface-to-air missiles at Woody Island more than a year ago and had deployed anti-ship cruise missiles there on at least one occasion.

SEE ALSO: China to start work this year on disputed Scarborough shoal in South China Sea

It had also constructed hardened shelters with retractable roofs for mobile missile launchers at Fiery Cross, Subi and Mischief and enough hangars at Fiery Cross for 24 combat aircraft and three larger planes, including bombers.

US officials told Reuters last month that China had finished building almost two dozen structures on Subi, Mischief and Fiery Cross that appeared designed to house long-range surface-to-air missiles.

In his Senate confirmation hearing in January, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson angered China by saying it should be denied access to islands it had built up in the South China Sea.

Tillerson subsequently softened his language, saying that in the event of an unspecified “contingency,” the United States and its allies “must be capable of limiting China‘s access to and use of” those islands to pose a threat.

In recent years, the United States has conducted a series of what it calls freedom-of-navigation operations in the South China Sea, raising tensions with Beijing. – Reuters

Donald Trump's presidency could be finished by Russia investigations, former NSA analyst says

25 March 2017
Donald Trump could be forced to leave office over the investigations into his administration’s links with Russia, a former national National Security Agency (NSA) analyst has warned.

John Schindler, a security expert and former counterintelligence officer, said that if the US President was to face an indictment over allegations his campaign team colluded with Russia to disrupt the presidential election, it could put an end to his presidency.

Speaking to CBC radio, Mr Schindler said: “If, not just people around him, but the president himself is facing possible indictment down the road, that could be a game changer. He could be removed from office for that, whether he wants to be or not."

Mr Schindler said that with the FBI investigation, actions by Congress and a possible independent inquiry, Mr Trump and his team’s alleged ties to Russia would "inevitably" be made public.

“The administration isn’t getting away from this story,” he said.

It comes after FBI director James Comey's confirmed the Bureau was looking into both Russia’s alleged interference with the 2016 election and also possible links between Moscow and members of Mr Trump’s campaign team.

Other congressional committees also are investigating a possible Russian connection mostly behind closed doors.

But there have also been suggestions the investigation could lead nowhere.

Carl Bernstein, one of the journalists who broke the Watergate scandal, claimed the US President was involved in a “cover up” to hide connections between members of his campaign team and Russia.

Responding to these concerns, Mr Schindler said it was “possible” the investigation could come to a dead end and added: “Trump, by inclination, doubles down, triples down, quintuples down at every opportunity.”

Mr Trump’s former election campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who was accused of once working to further the interests of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is now a leading focus of the investigation by American intelligence.

Mr Manafort volunteered to testify as part of the investigation and he is expected to be interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee, the panel’s chairman has said.

For Mr Schindler, the fact Mr Manafort is willing to testify shows he knows he is facing some very serious federal charges and “wants to clear the air”.

He said: “It tells me that Trump's whole defence is one member of his inner circle away from turning state's evidence and spilling some beans and it starts to be all over. We're not there yet. But I think that day's coming."

US-led coalition not protecting civilians: Amnesty International

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Residents carry the bodies of several people killed during fighting between Iraq security forces and Islamic State militants on the western side of Mosul, Iraq.APBy Yaron Steinbuch-March 28, 2017 | 4:22pm

 A recent surge in the number of civilian casualties in Mosul suggests that the US-led coalition is not doing enough to protect the citizens during its campaign to defeat ISIS in Iraq, Amnesty International said Tuesday.

The human-rights group cited an “alarming pattern of US-led coalition airstrikes which have destroyed whole houses with entire families inside,” CBS News reported.

Failure to take precautions to prevent civilian casualties would result in a “flagrant violation of international humanitarian law,” the group said.

Amnesty International’s report followed a March 17 strike in the al-Jadida district of west Mosul that may have killed more than 100 civilians. The group also cited a second strike Saturday that it said killed “up to 150 people.”

Meanwhile, UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said Tuesday that at least 307 civilians had been killed and 273 wounded in western Mosul since Feb. 17.

He said the extremists have been herding people into booby-trapped buildings to be used as human shields.

“This is an enemy that ruthlessly exploits civilians to serve its own ends, and clearly has not even the faintest qualm about deliberately placing them in danger,” he said, Reuters reported. “It is vital that the Iraqi security forces and their coalition partners avoid this trap.”

US officials are investigating the credibility of the claims of civilian casualties in Iraq’s second city.

The death toll among Mosul’s mostly Sunni population could be one of the worst since the 2003 US-led invasion, raising questions about Iraq’s Shi’ite-led government’s ability to avoid alienating the city’s mostly Sunni population.

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In Baghdad, US Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley said Monday that what caused the blast was still unknown – adding that “some degree of certainty will be known in the coming days following the investigation.”

“It is very possible that Daesh blew up that building to blame it on the coalition in order to cause a delay in the offensive on Mosul and cause a delay in the use of coalition airstrikes,” Milley said, using an Arabic term for ISIS, Reuters reported.

“It is possible that a coalition airstrike did it. We don’t know yet. There are investigators on the ground,” he added.

Iraqi troops have retaken eastern Mosul and are pushing through the west but have faced tough resistance around the Old City, where narrow streets and dense housing force close-quarters battles.

Thousands of civilians have been fleeing the fighting but as many as half a million may be trapped inside the embattled city.

In January, Iraq declared the eastern half of Mosul “fully liberated.” Iraqi forces are now fighting to retake the western half.

Panic spreads in Iraq, Syria as record numbers of civilians are reported killed in U.S. strikes

An elderly man sits speaking incoherently amid the rubble of a building in the Mosul al-Jadida neighborhood of Mosul, Iraq, on March 24. (Alice Martins for The Washington Post)

By Loveday Morris and Liz Sly March 28 at 4:04 PM

MOSUL, Iraq — A sharp rise in the number of civilians reported killed in U.S.-led airstrikes in Iraq and Syria is spreading panic, deepening mistrust and triggering accusations that the United States and its partners may be acting without sufficient regard for lives of noncombatants.

The U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State in Iraq has taken every measure to protect civilians and will investigate reports of civilian deaths during an operation in Mosul, U.S. Brig. Gen. Matthew Isler said on March 26. (Reuters)

Panic spreads in Iraq, Syria as record numbers of civilians are reported killed in U.S. strikes.docx by Thavam Ratna on Scribd

Libya Can’t Save Itself

As fighting heats up between rival armed groups and Russia increases its involvement, a power vacuum threatens to tear the country apart.

BY KARIM MEZRAN, MATTIA TOALDO-MARCH 23, 2017

The new year seems to have brought one piece of bad news after another for Libya, threatening to mark a new phase in the country’s endless slide into chaos. Hopes that last year’s defeat of the Islamic State in its self-proclaimed “emirate” in Sirte would usher in a period of relative calm have been dashed, as fighting has escalated recently in four different parts of the country.

The “oil crescent” east of Sirte, where 60 percent of Libya’s oil production transits, in March twice changed hands between the anti-Islamist Libyan National Army (LNA) of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar — a former Qaddafi-era officer who turned against the dictator and whose forces currently dominate the east — and the U.N.-backed Presidency Council, a collective head of state that sits in the capital of Tripoli, where militias nominally loyal to the council fight against rival groups — and increasingly among themselves. In the south, Haftar’s LNA has repeatedly clashed with armed groups from the coastal city of Misrata. And in the east, since 2014, fighting between the LNA and local Islamist Shura Councils in Benghazi and in Derna has never really ended.

Since 2014, the country has been split between rival governments: one in the east and two in Tripoli. In May of that year, then-Gen. Haftar started Operation Dignity, an anti-Islamist insurgency that initially focused on the eastern city of Benghazi. A month later, a coalition of militias from cities in western Libya formed Libya Dawn and conquered Tripoli. The conflict between the forces that defeated Muammar al-Qaddafi has since devolved into a bitter struggle for power, resources, and control of the country’s sprawling security sector.

In December 2015, the mediation of the U.N. mission in Libya (UNSMIL) led to the signing of the Libyan Political Agreement, which aimed to form a national unity government, by rival members of parliament from eastern and western Libya. But while UNSMIL is tasked with negotiating the implementation of the agreement, it is now effectively headless. The mandate of the current U.N. special representative for Libya, Martin Kobler, came to an end this month, and he lost the trust of key players in Libya long ago. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres’s attempts to appoint former Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad as his special representative came up against an 11th-hour veto from U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration.

Rival negotiating tracks by regional powers, particularly Egypt and Algeria, have also failed to produce any breakthrough. As a result, most channels of communication between eastern and western Libya have collapsed.

Russia is becoming increasingly involved, trying to fill the void left by the collapse of the U.N. track and the disinterest of both the Trump administration and the Europeans. It is unclear what Moscow really wants in Libya, but it seems to be pursuing a strategy that acknowledges the de facto partition of the country, promising both political and military support for Haftar’s battle in the east while signing contracts for oil and discussing business opportunities in commodities trading and future construction projects with the institutions in Tripoli. While there are reports that Russian special forces may be helping Haftar, there is still no evidence of decisive Russian military support for the LNA, and it is fair to say that the Kremlin is diversifying its political investment in the country by talking to all sides.
Russia’s increasing political backing and the anti-Islamist winds blowing in Washington have strengthened Haftar’s belief that there is no point in negotiating a political solution with the forces in western Libya. Despite heavy pressure from his Egyptian patrons, he refused to even meet the head of the Presidency Council, Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, in Cairo on Feb. 14 to discuss a road map for negotiations. He has instead rededicated himself to his main goal of “fighting extremism” by stepping up pressure on Misratan forces in the south and the district of Jufra and by announcing an imminent — albeit unlikely — “liberation” of Tripoli.

Western Libya, meanwhile, is at risk of ever greater fragmentation. The Presidency Council has effectively been reduced to two of its originally nine members — Sarraj and his deputy, Ahmed Maiteeq — and lacks any real control of dynamics on the ground. The capital is dominated by a syndicate of militias that are now fighting against armed groups loyal to a rival government. Outside of Tripoli, a similar archipelago of local armed groups controls events on the ground.

Given the lack of desire to compromise in the east and lack of credible interlocutors in the west, a political settlement reuniting the country will likely prove elusive. If Libya and the international community hope to avoid a bloody new chapter in the civil war, they should focus on three tracks to be pursued in the short term, in parallel to the bigger-picture negotiations.

First, Libya needs a de-conflicting mechanism to avoid escalation. If the U.N. envoy cannot do it, someone else in the West should. What better opportunity for Britain to show its continued relevance after Brexit than this? Or why not the French foreign minister, who could beef up his legacy just weeks before leaving office? This should only be a temporary replacement for a fully functioning U.N. mission capable of working on reconciliation, local cease-fires, and monitoring human rights violations. Both a temporary negotiator and the U.N. could work on a number of confidence-building measures, such as establishing permanent channels of communication, liberating prisoners, reopening roads, and sharing humanitarian aid.

Second, the country needs what economist Hala Bugaighis calls a “Libyan Economic Agreement” on how to peacefully share its oil wealth. Libya sits on Africa’s biggest hydrocarbon reserves: In the run-up to the 2011 war, it produced 1.6 million barrels per day and accumulated more than $100 billion in reserves — a considerable amount for a population of 6 million. Much of the fighting in the last few years has revolved around oil installations or smuggling hubs. Negotiating a new social contract may take some time, but in the meantime, two measures would represent a good start: The government in Tripoli should strengthen financial support for all of Libya’s municipalities, including areas controlled by Haftar, and oil installations should be placed under the control of the independent National Oil Corporation in Tripoli, with attempts to establish parallel economic institutions punished by international sanctions.

Finally, Tripoli must be the heart of international efforts. The most pressing need is a plan to free the city of all heavy weapons, pushing militias to stock them outside of civilian-populated areas. This is an important condition to allow the Libyan government to operate and to facilitate international assistance.
These tasks are very difficult. The alternative, however, is a new escalation that would destroy what little is left of Libya’s institutions and create the conditions for the re-emergence of jihadi groups.

It will take a heavyweight like the United States to push Libya toward peace. Washington, with its enormous soft and hard power, could pressure all sides into an agreement while at the same time dissuading external actors from intervening in the country. The big question is whether the will exists in the Trump administration to get involved in Libya. The National Security Council, in reviewing U.S. policy in different areas, should consider the levers that the United States has in Libya and the importance of the country in countering terrorism and instability.

During the most recent Republican administration, under President George W. Bush, the United States pursued a pragmatic policy in Libya that succeeded in peacefully eliminating the country’s stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. It is hard to believe that Trump will be able to duplicate that model. Without swift international action, however, Libya appears poised for another round of violence. It may well be that we will look back at this moment in Libya and say that the medicine was there but no doctor had the courage to use it.

Photo credit: John Moore/Getty Images

Millions are on the brink of starvation in east Africa. We must act fast

Families in the region are once more forced into a daily struggle to find food. We can help to avoid a repetition of the famine of 1984

A woman carries a water bin on her back in Magadi, Kenya. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Farmers give bottled water to their goats in Magadi, Kenya, in March 2017. ‘We can do something to reduce the scale and severity of this emergency. But time is running out.’ Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Emma Thompson is an actor and ActionAid ambassador-Tuesday 28 March 2017

When I saw the East Africa Crisis Appeal launched recently across our screens by the Disaster Emergency Committee (DEC), my thoughts returned to a man I met when I visited Ethiopia with ActionAid in 2005.

Sitting in a small settlement about four hours south of the capital, Addis Ababa, he spoke without emotion about the 1984 famine. “In 1984 one third of this community died … We ate soil mixed with dirty water. All the cattle died. We couldn’t feed our children. People just walked, they knew not where. Many died on the road and were left unburied.”

Today the images and stories coming out of Ethiopia and its neighbours in east Africa are similarly heartbreaking. In 2017, 16 million people are on the brink of starvation and desperately in need of food, water and medical treatment. Drought and conflict mean that people are already dying in South Sudan and Somalia. In Kenya, the government has declared a national emergency and Ethiopia is battling a new wave of drought following the strongest El Niño on record.

This is even more distressing considering the incredible resilience of families in this region who have battled recurring droughts and made amazing strides. While visiting one community in Dalocha where people had had access to clean water for seven years, I met a woman who doled out 40 litres per person at the water kiosk. She told me how this had transformed their lives. “Before the kiosk, we depended on rainwater, river water and digging ponds. We’d walk three or four hours to collect water,” she said.

One of the women told me that girls could now go to school; women could use the time they saved to cook, to wash clothes, to grow vegetables. She said they had begun to discuss business matters with their husbands, aware that when men and women work together, they are stronger.

I’m deeply concerned that all this progress could be lost, now that families are once again forced into a daily struggle to find food. I’m also frustrated with the continual resistance by governments and corporations to tackling climate change which is increasing the frequency of droughts.

But what troubles me most right now is that women, older people and children in this region are suffering once again. The UN has said that 800,000 severely malnourished children are at risk today of dying of starvation unless they get treatment fast.

One member of ActionAid’s team has just returned from Somaliland, and told me about a great-grandmother she met; 90-year-old Fatima was holding her three-year-old great-grandson Umer as if she would never let go. Fatima had been taking care of Umer for three months because his parents left with their surviving livestock in search of water and pasture. Fatima has no water or milk and is making do with rice and flour. Every day she prays for rain so that her family will return home.

We can save lives if we move fast. The DEC is made up of 13 member charities who are already working on the ground with communities across east Africa and have the expertise to provide life-saving aid to some of the worst-affected people. Right now, they are delivering food, water and medical treatment to millions across the region.

We must not abandon Fatima, her family and the many other families to the ravages of climate change, war and conflict. We can do something to reduce the scale and severity of this emergency and avoid the famine of 1984 happening all over again. But time is running out. Our support has never been more urgent.