In September, scientists announced they have decoded the cane toad genome, potentially paving the way for new weapons to repel the slimy invaders.
The successful effort potentially makes it easier to identify viruses that can be used to attack the toxic toads.
Bears on the mend
The treatment of bears imprisoned in Asian bile farms is heartbreaking.
But the good news is they can recover from their ordeal if given the right care during rehabilitation, going on to lead relatively stress-free lives even after years of torture.
Tasty trick
Blockchain isn’t just for bitcoin and other clever stuff best left to the financial experts.
It can also help tackle illegal tuna fishing, helping to ensure the fish on your dish is more sustainable and bringing much-needed transparency to an important global industry.
Why did the fish cross the road?
Crossing roads is hard enough if you have legs.
You might think it’s impossible for fish, and technically you’d be right.
But Queensland researchers have invented a device that lets fish do the next best thing: swim upstream through culverts beneath the road, even if they’re facing a raging torrent in the opposite direction.
Epic feat
The excitingly named “epic duck challenge” proved that drones can do an even better job of surveying wildlife than human scientists.
This development should help this under-resourced area of research finally take flight (sorry).
And before we leave the animal stories, there’s just time to take you back inside the world of million-dollar beauty pageants… for camels.
We guess beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.
Ready to wow the judges. Source: Mahmood Al amri and Jaime Gongora/The Conversation
Feeling the energy
Yes, it was a spirit-sapping year for energy policy, with one round of bickering after another.
But throughout the year, South Australia’s big battery has been quietly kicking goals.
It celebrated its birthday in late November, and although questions remain over what will happen when its battery packs need replacing, it made AU$13 million during the first half of 2018, and has generally been a roaring success considering that it owes its existence to some billionaires’ banter on Twitter.
Grounds for optimism
Your coffee habit could do more than give you a pick-me-up.
And if you like thinking about trees, why not sign up to our Beating Around the Bush series, with plenty more uplifting musings on some of Australia’s favourite species.
When Bill Anders took this photograph from the Apollo spacecraft on Christmas Eve in 1968, our relationship with the world changed forever
This photograph is now half a century old. It was taken by the astronaut Bill Anders on Christmas Eve 1968 as the Apollo 8 spacecraft rounded the dark side of the moon for a fourth time. When Earth came up over the horizon, Anders scrabbled for his Hasselblad camera and started clicking.
In that pre-digital age, five days passed. The astronauts returned to Earth; the film was retrieved and developed. In its new year edition, Life magazine printed the photo on a double-page spread alongside a poem by US poet laureate James Dickey: “And behold / The blue planet steeped in its dream / Of reality, its calculated vision shaking with the only love.”
This was not quite the first look at our world from space. Lunar probes had sent back crudely scanned images of a crescent Earth shrouded in cloud. A satellite had even taken a colour photo that, in the autumn of 1968, the radical entrepreneur Stewart Brand put on the cover of his first Whole Earth Catalog. The next edition, in spring 1969, used Anders’s photograph, by now known as Earthrise.
Brand’s catalogue was a DIY manual for the Californian counterculture, a crowdsourced compendium of life hacks about backpacking, home weaving, tantra art and goat husbandry. Its one-world, eco ethos was a weird offshoot of the macho tech of the space age – those hunks of aluminium run on rocket fuel and cold war rivalries. But then looking back at Earth was itself a weird offshoot of the moon missions. It just happened that Apollo 8’s aim – to locate the best lunar landing sites – needed high-res photography, which was also good for taking pictures of planets a quarter of a million miles away.
Brand was one of a group of environmental activists who felt that an image of “Spaceship Earth” would bring us all together in watchfulness and care for our planetary craft and its precious payload. “Earthrise”, though, did more than just corroborate this gathering mood. With its incontestable beauty, a beauty that had needed no eye of a beholder for billions of years, it caught the human heart by surprise.
The crew of the Apollo 8 spacecraft (Bill Anders, centre) following the lunar orbital mission, 27 December 1968. Photograph: HO/AP
The Earth pictured in Earthrise looks unlike traditional cartographic globes that mark out land and sea along lines of latitude and longitude. Slightly more than half the planet is illuminated. The line dividing night and day severs Africa. Earth looks as if it is floating alone in the eternal night of space, each part awaiting its share of the life-giving light of the sun.
Apart from a small brown patch of equatorial Africa, the planet is blue and white. At first glance it seems to have the sheen of blue-veined marble. But look closer and that spherical perfection softens a little. Earth divulges its true state as oceanic and atmospheric, warmly welcoming and achingly vulnerable.
The blue is light scattered by the sea and sky. The white is the gaseous veneer that coats our planet and lets us live. You can just make out the “beautiful blue halo”, with its gentle shift from tender blue to purple black, that Yuri Gagarin noticed on his first low-orbit flight. That halo is our fragile biosphere, and is all that stands between us and the suffocating void.
Fifty years ago the biochemist James Lovelock was working for Nasa and developing a theory of Earth as a single, self-regulating superorganism. It had reached a homeostatic state conducive to life, he believed, against odds as long as “surviving unscathed a drive blindfold through rush-hour traffic”. Lovelock’s theory, later named Gaia after the Greek goddess of the Earth, makes a special kind of sense when you gaze at our planet from the moon.
The poet Archibald MacLeish caught it best for a piece in the New York Times on Christmas Day 1968 – oddly, when only the Apollo 8 crew had seen Earthrise. All MacLeish had to go on was the live television broadcast by the astronauts on 23 December, when Jim Lovell had pointed his camera out of the cabin window and captured a coarse monochrome image of Earth from 175,000 miles away. “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats,” MacLeish wrote, “is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold.”
MacLeish had jumped the gun by a few days; other writers had anticipated this sight centuries earlier. In his fantastical narrative The Man in the Moon(1638), the author and divine Francis Godwin has his hero fly to the moon in a machine harnessed to a flock of wild swans. As he ascends into space, the world’s landmasses diminish, not just in size but in significance – Africa is “like unto a pear that had a morsel bitten out upon one side of him” – while the ocean seems “like a great shining brightness” and the whole Earth “masks itself with a kind of brightness like another moon”. Godwin grasped that from space Earth would look terraqueous, and far more aqua than terra.
In Jules Verne’s Around the Moon (1870), three adventurers, fired to the moon by a giant space gun, look back at Earth and see “its delicate crescent suspended in the deep blackness of the sky” and “its light, rendered blueish by the thickness of its atmosphere”. When the narrator of HG Wells’s The First Men in the Moon (1901) sees Earth from a spaceship, its three-dimensionality starkly reveals itself in the dance of sunlight and shadow on its surface. “The land below us was twilight and vague,” he writes, “but westward the vast grey stretches of the Atlantic shone like molten silver.” These early sci-fi writers guessed correctly that, from space, a world made of water and air would shimmer as if it were alive. They saw Earthrise before the astronauts did.
Fanciful space flights, full of backward glances at our world, occur in very ancient texts. The lesson is always the same: don’t imagine you matter. The vastness of the world, which renders your own life so little, is itself a speck of dust adrift in the vast cathedral of space. Cicero’s Republic imagines the dead Roman general Scipio Africanus, hero of the second Punic war, appearing to his grandson, Scipio Aemilianus, in a dream. The younger Scipio finds himself in the heavens gazing down on Carthage, which he will later destroy in the third Punic war. The world has shrunk to the point where he is “scornful of our empire, which covers only a single point upon its surface”.
The Apollo 8 crew (from left) Frank Borman, James Lovell and Bill Anders. Photograph: Science & Society Picture Library/Getty Images“O how ridiculous are the boundaries of mortals!” wrote Seneca, imagining Earth from the same cosmic perspective. A fable by the second-century satirist Lucian of Samosata tells of a “sky-man” who flies to the moon. Looking back at Earth, he sees “how little there was for our friends the rich to be proud of … The widest-acred of them all had not a single Epicurean atom under cultivation.”
The ancients knew how minuscule our preoccupations would seem from afar. The whole earthers of the 1960s thought that photographic proof might help us to see this obvious truth in new ways. Border disputes, imperial wars, the enslavement of other peoples, the spoiling of the planet for selfish and ephemeral gain: all would be exposed as what the cosmologist Carl Sagan called “the squabbles of mites on a plum”.
And yet, to a mite, that plum is everything. The power of Earthrise as an image derived partly from its being a picture of the plum taken by a mite – one of the first three to escape the plum’s gravity. With the brown-grey desert of the moon as contrast, the Earth shone as if alert to its singularity. As Marina Benjamin writes in her book Rocket Dreams (2003), this made it “difficult not to imbue the planet with exemplariness”.
Earthrise was edited for anthropocentric ends. The Apollo 8 crew saw Earth to the side of the moon, not above it, and to them it seemed tiny. Anders compared it to being “in a darkened room with only one visible object, a small blue-green sphere about the size of a Christmas-tree ornament”. Nasaflipped the photo so that Earth seemed to be rising above the moon’s horizon, and then cropped it to make Earth look bigger and more focal. Earthrise was an Earth selfie, taken by earthlings.
The Indus river basin in Pakistan, photographed from a satellite. Photograph: VIIRS/Suomi NPP/Nasa-NOAA
Since 1968 the earthlings have had many visual reminders of their cosmic irrelevance. Their home planet has been demoted to what Sagan called the “pale blue dot”, the tiny fleck of Earth, no bigger than a pixel, in a photo of our galaxy taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 probe from 3.7bn miles away.
But we prefer to ignore the evidence. In our daily lives we are all flat earthers. We carry on thinking that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Nor is our stewardship of the planet any less culpably forgetful. We still squabble over the juiciest bits of the plum; we still fight and die over its pinprick empires; the rich and powerful seem more ludicrously puffed-up than ever.
Did the 22-year-old Donald Trump, when he first saw Earthrise, feel awed and humbled by human smallness? I’m guessing no. Our species is just as venal and measly-minded as it was half a century ago. Perhaps more so, now that the technology that excites us is not the rocket blasting us into deep space, but the computer coding that blasts us through a wormhole into cyberspace: a human-built universe composed of our own self-admiring obsessions, exhilarating and exhausting enough to fill a lifetime.
Still, Earthrise must have changed something. What’s seen can’t be unseen. Perhaps it flits across your mind when you open Google Earth and see that familiar virtual globe gently spinning. Just before you click and drag to fly yourself to some portion of the world no bigger than an allotment, you may briefly take in, with a little stomach lurch, that this slowly revolving sphere holds close to 8 billion people, living out lives as small and short and yet meaningful as the universe is infinite and eternal and yet meaningless. On that gigantic, glistening marble, mottled with blue-white swirls, lies everyone.
England's top doctor has accused the food industry of "failing the public" and is calling for taxes on unhealthy food high in sugar and salt.
Chief medical officer Prof Dame Sally Davies said her dream was to make fruit and vegetables cheaper for everyone from the proceeds.
In her annual report, she also urged the government to ban added sugar in jars of baby food.
The food industry said taxes would not change consumer behaviour.
Dame Sally Davies' report details plans to create a more healthy nation by 2040, with the focus on improving the environment we live in to make it easier for people to be healthier.
This means tackling the preventable causes of 50% of chronic diseases and 40% of cancers - namely, unhealthy diet, smoking, physical inactivity, drinking too much alcohol and air pollution, she said.
Based on the success of the tax on sugary drinks introduced in April, Dame Sally wants the government to do more to force the food industry to cut sugar and salt in our everyday food.
Parents would be surprised what is contained in baby food jars, Dame Sally said
Dame Sally said "industry had not delivered" on voluntary targets set by Public Health England to make their products healthier and called for them to do more.
"Those sectors that damage health must pay for their harm or subsidise healthier choices," her report says.
She hinted she would like to see a tax on chocolate and junk food, with the proceeds going to subsidise fruit and vegetables, which should be on offer in obvious places in shops.
But she recognised this was "a dream".
The report recommends:
extending the tax on sugary drinks to sweetened milk-based drinks
a ban on added sugar and salt in jars of baby and infant food
more ambitious targets for salt reduction in food (to 7g a day), saying progress had stalled since 2011
taxing foods high in sugar and salt, as a start
incentives to get people eating more fruit and vegetables
And it urges the government and NHS England to set targets to reduce inequalities in childhood obesity and smoking in pregnancy, which predominately affect poorer communities.
Dame Sally said obesity was an issue of inequality, with children and adults in the poorest communities more likely to have diseases related to their weight at an earlier age, and lasting for longer.
She said she would be accused of being "chief nanny" of a nanny state but it was her job to shape the environment for children who could not make their own choices.
Dame Sally hinted that she would like to see taxes from unhealthy foods subsidise fruit and vegetables, but acknowledged this was a "dream"
"We should not be adding empty calories to baby food," Dame Sally said.
"It sets the taste for sweeter food and results in children gaining unnecessary weight before going to primary school."
The report says a health index for the UK is needed to measure all the factors which affect our health and its outcomes in order to see if progress is being made.
'Wrong-headed legislation'
A spokesman from the Treasury said it would not shy away from further action, including tax changes, if the food industry "fails to face up to the scale of the problem through voluntary reduction programmes".
Kate Halliwell, head of UK diet and health policy at the Food and Drink Federation, said some manufacturers had been reducing sugar and calorie content in shopping baskets for more than a decade.
But she cautioned that changing recipes for food products could not happen overnight.
"Sugar plays a variety of roles beyond sweetness in food including colour, texture and consistency.
"It is for these reasons that we have long said that the guidelines are ambitious and will not be met across all categories or in the timescale outlined."
And she said portion control and product reformulation, rather than taxes, were policies more likely to change consumer behaviour.
"Food and drink companies should focus efforts where they can have the maximum impact, instead of managing the impact of wrong-headed legislation."
Meanwhile, the government has announced £3.13bn will be given to councils in England next year for public health initiatives, such as stop smoking services, weight management services and exercise support.
It represents a real terms cut of 4.6% since last year.
Constitutions do carry with them the politics of their drafting masters
It’s democracy that’s used to KILL democracy
Is that ugly, unruly conflict over? Was democracy brought back since going back to the pre-October 26 status quo?
2018-12-21
Democracy was the most cherished word during the past 50 plus days, along with the Constitution. Reference to Constitutionality in every sense was important for Parliamentary proceedings to be conducted as usual. Thus democracy, the constitution and constitutionality of decisions made and steps were taken became important with Friday, October 26, Presidential decisions. We were told through mainstream and social media and with protests in Colombo that we had to get back to democracy with Parliament functioning at whatever cost. The democracy we were told was about getting back to the pre-October 26 status quo.
It was this status quo all Fundamental Rights (FR) petitions to the Supreme Court prayed for. They prayed that the November 09 Gazette dissolving Parliament be ruled as null and void. All arguments were “based on the analysis of the nature, effect and meaning of Articles 33 (2) (c), 62 (2) and 70” as the SC ruling says, with 70(1) included. It was thus about President‘s powers in Article 33 (2) that includes and specifies the power vested in the President to summon, prorogue and dissolve Parliament”, but cannot be read outside the limitations laid down in Article 70(1). The SC ruling explains:
“By operation of the second paragraph of Article 70(1), the President cannot dissolve Parliament during the first four and a half years of its term unless he has been requested to do so by a resolution passed by not less than two thirds of the Members of Parliament [including those not present].” The Gazette dissolving Parliament and fixing parliamentary elections for 05 January 2019 was thus unanimously declared null and void. The SC argued only on provisions that were written into the Constitution. They paid attention to Fundamental Rights enshrined under Article 14 of the Constitution but were not expected to politically read the conflict.
What is hailed as an historic decision, is purely and technically a legal answer to the conflict, which in essence is a political conflict. Politically, the conflict remains unresolved. Constitutions do carry with them the politics of its drafting masters. The original Second Republican Constitution was drafted to be in line with Jayewardene Politics the UNP continues with. The yet to be abolished Executive Presidency came with that politics. Almost all Amendments to the Constitution came with ruling party politics.
The 04th Amendment required a People’s Referendum after a two-thirds majority in Parliament, as it sought to postpone Parliamentary Elections till 04 August 1989. Jayewardene manipulated the Referendum as well. It was Sinhala Buddhist racist politics of Jayewardene’s UNP Government that brought the 06th Amendment after the 1983 July massacre of Tamil people, which compelled TULF MPs to leave Parliament after August 1983. It is also the 06th Amendment that is used in indicting MP Maheswaran over her statement about the LTTE. 12th Amendment was never enacted, also for political reasons. The 14th Amendment was that which increased the Parliament from 168 to 225 MPs including a National List, that promised to have eminent personalities from different disciplines in Parliament.
"That leaves Sri Lanka without any serious alternatives discussed and people’s democracy strangled all along with Colombo middle class calls for democracy that does not mean anything to people’s lives."
The 18th Amendment not only scrapped the term limits of Presidency but also brought all Independent Commissions under the President’s influence and allowed the President to attend Parliament and take part in its business with all powers and privileges of an MP except the right to vote. The Parliament thus came to be manipulated by the Executive power, not the other way round. This 18th Amendment was allowed without a People’s Referendum by the SC bench chaired by Chief Justice Shiranee Bandaranayake. Most other amendments were necessary to follow up pieces of law.
One or two like the 17A were due to longtime lobbying and social pressure. Fundamentally, these amendments did not necessarily meet People’s demands, requirements and aspirations. They necessarily met the political necessities of ruling party leaders. Next was the (in)famous 19th Amendment.
All through the year 2014, the 19A was campaigned for by the Venerable Sobitha Thera and his group of supporters to abolish the Executive Presidency, explained as the root cause of all ills; mega corruption, nepotism, autocratic rule and everything else there should not be. The first compromise came with accepting a Common Candidate Sobitha Thera wanted to abolish the Executive Presidency and the Common Candidate the UNP wanted to defeat President Rajapaksa, as one and the same. That compromise was written into Common Candidate Sirisena’s election manifesto as: “The new Constitutional structure would be essentially an Executive allied with the Parliament through the Cabinet instead of the present autocratic Executive Presidential System.” (Page 14) The manifesto also said:
“I will not touch any Constitutional Article that could be changed only with the approval at a Referendum.” (ibid)Defeating Rajapaksa also required a Government that could stay put for a full term. It meant the UNP Government with Wickremesinghe as PM installed in 2015 January as the smallest Minority Government in Parliamentary history with just 20 per cent of the MPs had to continue in power. The required majority for the UNP Government was created on the strength of the new President voted in on UNP and minority votes. His power to dole out Ministerial portfolios to MPs who actually opposed him at the Presidential elections and represented the party he defected from to contest against Rajapaksa, held sway. Collecting the majority for the 100-Day UNP rule, was a crude horse deal the Colombo social activists and the Anti-Rajapaksa lobby accepted with applause as democratic and Constitutional.
True to the election manifesto, there was no abolishing of the Executive Presidency. The leadership of the ruling UNP Government drafted and adopted it the way they wanted. There was no Referendum too. People were no party to the 19A. As stressed in these pages many times before, 19A was rushed through with no proper debate and with clauses included at the will of the UNP leadership. It violated Article 23(1) of the Constitution that says: “All laws and subordinate legislation shall be enacted or made and published in Sinhala and Tamil, together with a translation thereof in English”. Democracy was when Tamil MP Praba Ganesan was shouted down by PM Wickremesinghe for requesting a Tamil copy of a clause hurriedly introduced. He was asked to use the English Copy. There were no Sampanthans or Sumanthirans to demand Tamil copies as a Constitutional Right and no JVP, JHU to demand Sinhala copies.
Speaker Chamal Rajapaksa too allowed its passage without insisting draft copies in all three languages. The 19th Amendment the Colombo middle-class social activists embrace with pride was written into the Constitution in the most undemocratic, unconstitutional and in a fiercely dictatorial manner. The UNP Government now continues for four and a half years, on the strength of Article 70(1) that does not allow dissolution of Parliament even if the Budget is defeated and a No Confidence Motion goes through. That’s not all in 19A. It also allows ghost alliances as National Governments to be propped up to provide ministerial portfolios for MPs bought through horse deals though everyone was shouting hoarse against such horse deals after October 26.
Once in the Constitution, 19A has to be respected for the sake of Democracy, irrespective of what politics there is. That is precisely why the crisis is yet not over. That is why a stable Government is not possible and that is also why most nauseating and stinking proposals are made to include the worst corrupt in Cabinet portfolios and for cobbling up hilarious National Governments. Proposals are made once again to install a national Government with the only SLMC MP in Parliament, who is neither the leader of the party nor its Secretary General. Even if it is dropped, it is yet crude politics of 19A that allows the Constitution to accept such hideous Governments on a resolution adopted in Parliament by a simple majority.
This is not condemned and opposed by urban middle-class saviours of democracy. Constitutional provisions adopted in the most undemocratic and unparliamentary manner written that way to allow deals and crossovers are democratic too when it suits the urban social activists and their funders. Thus there is no loud opposition to Karunanayake who had to resign on the CBSL bond scam issue, coming back to the Cabinet either by these funded voices. Bottom line is, all things undemocratic, corrupt and arrogantly autocratic are accepted and tolerated to showcase as saving democracy to keep Rajapaksa out. That leaves the TNA discredited and condemned among the Northern Tamil polity, with all its promises to have a new Constitution before 31 December 2016 nowhere in the horizon and all daily issues of the ordinary Tamil People left completely ignored by the ITAK leadership. The conflict that broke into the open on Friday, October 26 night gets dragged on, giving Rajapaksa yet another racist platform with a call to save the Sinhala Buddhist Unitary State.
That leaves Sri Lanka without any serious alternatives discussed and people’s democracy strangled all along with Colombo middle class calls for democracy that does not mean anything to people’s life.
Workers like Kamal are looking for employment opportunities outside Sri Lanka because the job opportunities and working conditions in the country are not attractive enough to retain them, while similar working conditions and wages are attracting foreign workers like Hong Chua to Sri Lanka.
This is an apparent reality in the local labour market; the Sri Lankan economy is gradually transitioning from a mere labour-sending economy into one that both sends and receives workers. The same employment opportunities, working conditions, and demand and supply conditions that necessitated outmigration of Sri Lankans workers is now attracting foreign workers into Sri Lanka. The only difference here is the relative point of reference of each group. In the eyes of Sri Lankans like Kamal, the local opportunities pale in comparison to those available in destinations such as Saudi Arabia, while from the point of view of Chinese immigrant workers like Hong Chua, the opportunities in Sri Lanka are rosy compared to their opportunities in the country of origin.
From Sending to Receiving A recent study identifies three phases of aggregate migration– net emigration (out-migration) phase, transition phase (growth in immigration numbers despite net emigration), and net immigration (in migration is greater than out-migration) phase. Sri Lanka is still a net emigration country. Nevertheless, a new trend is emerging in terms of labour migration.
In recent years, the gradual rise in immigrant workers in Sri Lanka coincided with the decline in the departure of Sri Lankans for overseas employment. In fact, worker departures from Sri Lanka have been experiencing a downward trend since 2014, and have dropped to 212,162 departures in 2017. At the same time, issuance and extension of resident visas for foreign nationals to reside in Sri Lanka have been on the rise to reach 53,583 in 2017 from 41,306 in 2014 (Figure 1).
As per the current regulatory framework in Sri Lanka, employment is allowed for certain types of resident visas. As shown in Figure 2, in 2017, out of the total 53,583 resident visas issued or extended to foreigners, 24% was for employment in the private sector. Almost equal shares of 16% each were for resident visas allocated for foreigners extending their services to the public sector and workers of Board of Investment (BOI) projects. In addition to these employment-related resident visas, two notable employment visa cohorts are students/scholarship holders and resident visas for medical purposes. As noted, 16% of resident visas are allocated for students and scholarships for foreigners, while those seeking resident visas for medical grounds account for 2%. Within the 16% identified as ‘other’, various types of resident visas, such as children of Sri Lankan parents, clergy, as well as a separate category for construction sector workers are included. Department of Immigration and Emigration reports that in 2017 there were 82 such ‘construction worker’ type resident visas issued, in addition to construction worker visas that may be already included under the category of workers for BOI projects.
Figure 2 suggests that nearly 60% of resident visas or the approximate 30,000 issued/renewed in 2017 are for employment purposes. Additionally, there may be other lawfully residing foreigners who would have obtained or renewed their visas for employment before 2017.
As shown in Figure 3, apart from these lawfully residing and working foreigners, another group is made up of unauthorised foreign workers. They consist of those working without work authorisation for their visa type, those over-staying their resident visas for employment, and those who have illegally entered Sri Lanka. The exact numbers of such unauthorised foreign workers in Sri Lanka remain unknown. Despite the absence of a clear estimate of the number of such unauthorised foreign workers, statistics for 2017 from the Department of Immigration and Emigration show that there were 793 investigations and 392 removals of foreign national for violating the Immigration and Emigration Act No. 20 of 1948.
Immigration and Emigration Act
The existing Immigration and Emigration Act in Sri Lanka is archaic. Despite the amendments in 1993, 1998, 2006, and 2015, the Immigration and Emigration Act No. 20 of 1948 still needs revising to address the current mobility of individuals in and out of Sri Lanka, including the skills deficits and labour shortages in the labour market, and the demographic transitions of the native population.
The limitations of the existing Act include the absence of a separate visa category to facilitate employment of foreign nationals, the inability to allow the domestic labour market to benefit from the large proportion (16% of resident visas) of foreign students that reside in Sri Lanka, and not facilitating family members of diplomatic and employment purpose resident visa holders to contribute to the local labour market.
The process to repeal the existing the Immigration and Emigration Act by way of a drafting a new Immigration and Emigration Bill and paving the path for a new Act is already underway, and it is expected to be finalised and effective in mid-2019.
Institutional Framework
Along with an updated Act to govern immigration in to the country, Sri Lanka also needs a matching institutional framework to ensure efficient and foolproof operation of related activities, such as ensuring employers do not penalise native workers, authorisation of work permits, validation of foreign qualifications, experience and credentials, and continuous monitoring of foreign workers in Sri Lanka in terms of aspects such as their welfare, health, integration to the local society, and return to their country of origin at the end of their working period.
In formulating such an institutional framework, it is important to note that the migration transition is a long, complicated, and dynamic phase. Research hints that, initially, immigrants would be socially marginalised in Sri Lanka, followed by increased family reunification when more skilled immigrants start to pursue settlement in Sri Lanka with their families. At the tail end of the migration, the transition would be a phase that requires attention to long-term inclusion and integration of immigrants in the Sri Lankan society. Once this immigration transition is complete Sri Lanka may embark on an era of net immigration.
Future
As such, new laws, regulations and institutions that are being drafted at present ought to be sufficiently forward thinking to take Sri Lanka beyond the incipient beginning of immigration to all the way across the migration transition phase and to a possible scenario of net immigration. The country cannot afford any weakness in the institutional framework in immigration to foster a breeding ground for hostility and friction between natives and foreign-born workers.
Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe swearing in as Minister of National Polices, Economic Affairs, Resettlement and Rehabilitation, Northern Province Development, Vocational Training and Skills Development and Youth Affairs before President Maithripala Si
The gigantic mass uprising for Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and democracy that happened last week is probably unique in the third world. It is unique with national unity abandoning racism and communalism. In the Galle Face Green, it was inspiring to see people of all kind in a spirit of solidarity. They expect the arrival of Lankan nation and defeat of fascism.
Free and fair elections are, no doubt, central to a democracy; but when conducted in the wake of the questionable sacking of Parliament, they may be anything but. Lanka is at a crossroads where it has to make a crucial choice between democratic consolidation and a retreat to authoritarianism.
Judiciary independent
The judiciary has a crucial task at hand; so far they played well, extremely well. In fact many political analysts claim that democratic steps taken by Yahapalanaya; such as return of commissions reducing the power of President to appoint Judges has made judiciary more independent. Yes, but in this case the mass uprising of people demanding justice must have an induction within the judiciary too.
We are in a situation somewhat similar to the civil war in America where Abraham Lincoln was challenged by racist white Americans. Abraham Lincoln, also a lawyer, legislator and vocal opponent of slavery, was elected 16th President of the United States in November 1860, shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War. Lincoln proved to be a shrewd military strategist and a savvy leader: His Emancipation Proclamation paved the way for slavery’s abolition, while his Gettysburg Address stands as one of the most famous pieces of oratory in American history.
Victory celebrations
Prime Minister Wickremesinghe made a sound speech at the Galle Face Green victory celebrations; may not comparable to that of his US counterpart but gravity is no less in this belated bourgeoisie revolution in Lanka.
Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in a one-room log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky; Lincoln’s formal schooling was limited to three brief periods in local schools, as he had to work constantly to support his family.
Lincoln got a job working on a river flatboat hauling freight down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. After settling in the town of New Salem, Illinois, where he worked as a shopkeeper and a postmaster, Lincoln became involved in local politics as a supporter of the Whig Party. Like his Whig heroes Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, Lincoln opposed the spread of slavery to the territories, and had a grand vision of the expanding United States, with a focus on commerce and cities rather than agriculture.
On the other hand, born on March 24, 1949 in Colombo, Ranil is the second son of Esmond Wickremesinghe and Nalini Wickremesinghe nee Wijewardene. His father was an ex-Samasamajist lawyer, who became a press baron taking over the Lake House Group of newspapers.
Wickremesinghe entered the Faculty of Law at the University of Ceylon, Colombo campus. After graduation, he completed the law exams at the Sri Lanka Law College and took oaths as an advocate in 1972.
Thus Ranil Wickremesinghe has a powerful position in Lankan society compared to the then position of Abraham Lincon. Therefore Premier Ranil Wickremesinghe has no excuses; he must go forward and unite the country for progress.
Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe meeting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Hyderabad House, New Delhi during his recent visit. Prof. Maithree Wickramasinghe is also in the picture. Picture courtesy Prime Minister's Media Division
The Earth from Apollo 8 as it rounded the dark side of the moon. Photograph: Nasa/AFP/Getty Images
The crew of the Apollo 8 spacecraft (Bill Anders, centre) following the lunar orbital mission, 27 December 1968. Photograph: HO/AP
The Indus river basin in Pakistan, photographed from a satellite. Photograph: VIIRS/Suomi NPP/Nasa-NOAA
All through the year 2014, the 19A was campaigned for by the Venerable Sobitha Thera and his group of supporters to abolish the Executive Presidency, explained as the root cause of all ills; mega corruption, nepotism, autocratic rule and everything else there should not be. The first compromise came with accepting a Common Candidate Sobitha Thera wanted to abolish the Executive Presidency and the Common Candidate the UNP wanted to defeat President Rajapaksa, as one and the same.
