Sri Lanka News Updates with Discussions

By Shihar Aneez and Ranga Sirilal

COLOMBO, Nov 10 (Reuters) - A united Sri Lankan opposition on Tuesday put its weight behind state sector trade unions which are going on a five-day work-to-rule in their push for higher pay.

State power, water, oil and port workers will not work outside assigned duties and set working hours from Wednesday after negotiations broke down as the government tries to slash spending to meet the terms of an IMF loan deal.

Text of address delivered by K. H. J. Wijayadasa former Secretary to the President On The Public Servant and the Politician: Harmony and Conflict at the Seminar Organised by the Sri Lanka Association of Retired Executives, Professionals and Academics and held at the Postgraduate Institute of Management on 3rd November 2009.

Today, there is absolutely no disharmony or conflict between the public servant and the politician thanks to three severe blows directed at the public servants by the politicians in a short span of 50 years in order to cut them down to size. The first blow was the abolition of the Ceylon Civil Service in 1963, which was deemed to be the guardian of good governance. The second was the promulgation of the Republican Constitution in 1972 spelling disaster to the independence of the public service. This was followed in quick succession by the passage of the so-called bahuboota or nonsensical Constitution of 1977 resulting in the institution of the executive presidential system of government characterised by the sadistic winner-takes-all syndrome and the one man show pandemic.

Scientists have warned that more than a third of species assessed in a major international biodiversity study are threatened with extinction.

According to a report by BBC News, out of the 47,677 species in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, 17,291 were deemed to be at serious risk.

These included 21 percent of mammals, 30 percent of amphibians, 70 percent of plants and 35 percent of invertebrates.

Conservationists warned that not enough was being done to tackle the main threats, such as habitat loss.

WPC erupts over body building equipment to PSD

by Shamindra Ferdinando

The JVP and the UPFA yesterday clashed at the budget debate of the Western Provincial Council over allocation of funds to procure a set of body building equipment for Temple Trees.

Dr. Nalinda Jayatissa, JVP member of the WPC, said that of Rs.11 million allocated for development and promotion of sports in the entire province, Rs. 180,000 had been spent on body building equipment. The JVP Central Committee member said that Temple Trees could easily afford to buy whatever it needed and there was absolutely no need for the WPC to supply sports equipment to the Temple Trees.

Texas - Soldiers who witnessed the shooting rampage at Fort Hood that left 13 people dead reported that the gunman shouted `Allahu Akbar!` before opening fire, the base commander said Friday.

Lt. Gen. Robert Cone said officials had not yet confirmed that the suspected shooter, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, made the comment, which is Arabic for `God is great!` before the rampage Thursday, which left 30 people wounded, including the gunman.

An imam from a mosque Hasan regularly attended said Hasan, a lifelong Muslim, was a committed soldier, gave no sign of extremist beliefs and regularly wore his uniform at prayers.

Violence in the US involving soldiers is commonplace, with a rise in domestic abuse, murder and suicide since the wars began in Afghanistan and Iraq. But there is nothing commonplace about Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the soldier responsible for the biggest mass killing at a military base in the US.

He was not a soldier returning from deployment in either Iraq or Afghanistan, suffering from stress or combat fatigue. Hasan, although 39 years old, he had never served in a war zone. Instead, his horror of war came second-hand. He was a psychiatrist who listened to the harrowing stories of his comrades at the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington DC, and latterly at Fort Hood, Texas.

DIAC Rejects Unskilled Migrants Plan

Australian Immigration Minister Chris Evans has rejected a proposal by Sri Lanka`s immigration chief to allow unskilled workers to immigrate to Australia in a bid to stop the exodus of boatloads of immigrants turning up in Australian waters.

The Sir Lankan Commissioner P B Abeykoon told The Australian newspaper that his proposal would cut down the number of asylum seekers, a number that has been steadily rising over the past few months. It was whilst the Commissioner was in Canberra for talks that he raised the idea of unskilled migrants: The people who are going through the boats are unskilled labourers, fisherman, farmers, he commented.

Install your Windows Updates. Update your antivirus software. Scan your system regularly. Keep religious backups. It`s all good advice -- and it`s advice that I give to readers on a near-daily basis.

And maybe it`s all meaningless.

MIT researchers are warning that it doesn`t matter much what security measures you take with your computer. If someone wants in, they`re getting in.

The latest concern/attack involves data `leakage,` the idea that no matter how secure your data might be in storage, - even if it`s encrypted -, once it`s in actual use, it`s fair game. One area of research involves cached data: Say you decrypt your secret spreadsheet outlining your plans for world domination and have it open on your desktop. Other programs running in the background uses that same working area (the cache) on the machine... and, coded properly, one such program could relatively easily `steal` what else is going on in the cache at that time.

It`s been a year since Barack Obama stood on a stage in Chicago`s Grant Park on a balmy November night and made Americans feel, for a little while at least, that their world wasn`t coming down around their ears.

It was a brief speech by Obama standards but laden with the dreamy, tranquilizing platitudes Americans wanted so badly, at least back then.

Here was a man, whose very appearance screamed change, talking about how `young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native-American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled` had come together and shown that America is not a country of two polarities left and right but rather a truly United States.

The Wayfinders

The ancient Polynesians, Nainoa Thompson told me, were not navigators in a modern sense so much as wayfinders. Sailing from Tahiti for Oahu, for example, they did not set course for Pearl Harbor they set out to find a chain of islands, the Hawaiian Archipelago. Moreover, the distances in the Pacific are not as formidable as they appear on a chart. With the exception of the three most distant points of the Polynesian Triangle, Rapa Nui, Hawaii and Aotearoa (New Zealand), no voyage from Melanesia through Polynesia has to traverse more than 500 kilometres of open water, at least as the crow flies. And there is more land than the maps reveal. At sea one can see roughly 50 kilometres in any direction. Draw a circle with a radius of 50 kilometres around every landfall, and suddenly the ocean shrinks and the area effectively covered by land increases.

Fiji`s self-appointed prime minister, Frank Bainimarama, has given Australia and New Zealand 24 hours to get their high commissioners out of Fiji.

He is expelling them both and recalling his own envoys because he says Canberra and Wellington are interfering in his country`s judiciary.

Mr Bainimarama sacked all the country`s judges when he did not like their decisions and he believes Australia has been trying to thwart his attempts to hire replacements from Sri Lanka.

This was many years that happened to me but I remember it as last week. Those days I passed my SSC with credits then applied to the Law College. I think I went for a test as well. I was informed later on that I got through or was selected. Then I went to this office at Hulftsdorp to see my results. I was greeted by one or two senior students, went to see the results then as I was coming along the corridor one of them tried to drag me into a room then I noticed there were a few more inside as well. I made a struggle to escape then ran off from the premises and never went back again.

Moldova Microfinance Alliance (MMA), a non-governmental organization, was founded in 1997 with the mission to create and develop new institutions - credit and savings associations, cooperatives, micro and small scale enterprises. MMA has provided these institutions with on-site advice, training and assistance at obtaining financial resources in order to stimulate private initiative, social and economic development.

Up to present, MMA has launched 235 SCAs and 15 Cooperatives of entrepreneurs. Creation of SCAs represented just one stage in microfinance and access to finance development and an episode of a successful relationship between MMA - SCAs. The future collaboration of MMA with the newly created organizations materializes provision of training and consultancy assistance, and monitoring in order to increase Return on Assets and Return on Equity of SCAs and SCAs` members.

While the Dalai Lama was snubbed by President Barack Obama, who refused to meet with him last week, there was an open door policy everywhere else in our nation`s capital from congressional receptions to synagogues and schools.

One scene in particular is striking: the most famous monk of the 20th Century on the dais, lecturing on wisdom in the modern world as hundreds of enthralled monks and laymen look on below. The scene harks back to the golden era of Tibet, with the halls festooned with hundreds of strings of colorful Tibetan prayer flags, except the event took place at American University.

Available case records sent to Bribery Commission
The new Supreme Court Registrar is said to have sent by registered post early this week available records of two cases wanted by the Bribery and Corruption Commission to begin the probe against former Chief Justice Sarath Nanda Silva following a series of complaints lodged against him in relation to two cases heard by Supreme Court Benches headed by him.