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Rajapakse bows out, ending Sri Lanka power struggle

ASEAN+ December 15, 2018 15:59

By Agence France-Presse 
Colombo

Sri Lanka’s crisis looked over on Saturday as strongman Mahinda Rajapakse bowed out of a power battle that had crippled the strategically located island for seven weeks and sent it heading for a possible debt default.

Rajapakse held a multi-religious service at his home where he signed a letter backing down from the post of prime minister controversially conferred on him in October 26.

The 73-year-old ex-president made no immediate statement to reporters, but his aides said he was returning a fleet of limousines he had used since his disputed appointment.

President Maithripala Sirisena triggered the political turmoil by sacking premier Ranil Wickremesinghe and replacing him with his flamboyant former foe Rajapakse.

But Wickremesinghe refused to step down insisting that his sacking was illegal, leaving the Indian Ocean nation of 21 million people with two men claiming the premiership.

Rajapakse was then defeated in a no-confidence motion on November 14.

However, the following day, Speaker Karu Jayasuriya ruled that he would recognise neither man as prime minister, leaving Sri Lanka effectively without a government.

The country was then heading for a government shutdown as parliament failed to approve spending for 2019 and credit rating agencies downgraded its debt amid fears of default.

Rajapakse’s son Namal had announced Friday that his father — who as president ended Sri Lanka’s civil war in 2009 amid allegations of grave rights abuses — would throw in the towel “to ensure stability”.

Rajapakse’s decision came after the Supreme Court confirmed that he could not exercise the powers of a prime minister until he proved his legitimacy, which without enough support in parliament was impossible.

In a major climbdown, Sirisena agreed on Friday to reinstate Wickremesinghe on Sunday despite previously insisting he would never reappoint him as prime minister.

There was no immediate comment from Sirisena or his office on Saturday.

But an MP from his party, Lakshman Yapa Abeywardena, told reporters on Friday night that the president agreed to the latest measures to avoid a government shutdown after December 31.

“If the stalemate continued, we would have ended up without a budget for 2019 and the government would not have been able to function,” Abeywardena said.

On Wednesday, the legislature had voted overwhelmingly to demand the reinstatement of Wickremesinghe.

The leftist JVP, or the People’s Liberation Front, insists that Sirisena should be investigated for orchestrating what they call a coup and that there should also be an impeachment process.

On Thursday Sirisena suffered a major blow when the Supreme Court ruled that he had breached the constitution on November 9 by dissolving parliament and calling early elections.

His sacking of parliament had earlier been suspended, but the legislature descended into farce on multiple occasions with MPs throwing punches, hurling projectiles and chili powder and boycotting proceedings.

ศาสตร์เกษตรดินปุ๋ย : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation

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Fake news vs fact in online battle for truth

ASEAN+ December 15, 2018 15:30

By Agence France-Presse 
Paris

Since US President Donald Trump weaponised the term “fake news” during the 2016 presidential election campaign, the phrase has gone viral.

Increasingly it is used by politicians around the world to denounce or dismiss news reports that do not fit their version of the truth.

But as news outlets defend their work, false information is saturating the political debate worldwide and undermining an already weak level of trust in the media and institutions.

The term has come to mean anything from a mistake to a parody or a deliberate misinterpretation of facts.

At the same time, misinformation online is increasingly visible in attempts to manipulate elections.

– Misinformation –

The build-up to Trump’s 2016 victory, for example, saw numerous examples of hoaxes and false news stories: from Hillary Clinton’s alleged links to a child sex ring to a false report the Pope had endorsed Trump.

Misinformation had “a significant impact” on voting decisions, according to Ohio State University researchers, who questioned voters. But it was impossible to prove that false information swung the election for Trump.

As president, Trump still denounces any information that displeases him as “fake news”. Experts say his aides, meanwhile, have offered a mixture of truth and distortions, sometimes described as “alternative facts”.

“Lies and fabrication even seem to bolster one’s reputation and political prowess among their core supporters,” said John Huxford of Illinois State University, who researches false information.

Some studies even suggest that, as partisanship has risen, more people are willing to believe falsehoods. One 2017 survey, for example, showed 51 percent of Republicans still believed that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, despite the hoax having been debunked.

– Eroding trust –

In 2018, the average level of trust in the news, across 37 countries, remained relatively stable at 44 percent, according to a poll by YouGov for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

But false information spread by authority figures has not helped matters.

In Ukraine, for example, authorities staged the death of Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko at the end of May, to foil a real plot to assassinate him.

Reports of the fake death made in good faith by mainstream media were “a godsend for paranoid people and conspiracy theorists,” said Christophe Deloire, secretary general of media rights watchdog Reporters Without Borders.

Trust in traditional media remains higher than for social networks, according to the YouGov poll. Only 23 percent of those polled said they trusted the news they found on social media.

But a study released by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in March found that false news spreads more rapidly on Twitter than real news does.

Social networks in crisis

Many believe Facebook is the main vehicle for false information.

It was forced to admit that Cambridge Analytica, a political firm working for Donald Trump in 2016, had hijacked the data of tens of millions of its users. Some critics of the Brexit referendum accuse Cambridge Analytica of having used that data to swing voters towards the “Leave” vote.

In the US, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s campaign links with Russia has targeted Facebook accounts and private pages managed by the Internet Research Agency, a Russia-based “troll farm”.

Such was the level of concern that Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg has been questioned by the European Parliament and the US Congress.

The US giant in 2018 announced new measures to improve technology for tackling false information around the world.

Another country where Facebook has come under fire for spreading false information is Brazil, the scene of a giant truckers’ strike last May.

Fake audio of people supposedly connected to the strike was spread widely, said Cristina Tardaguila, founder of the Brazilian Agencia Lupa fact-checking organisation.

Most of the messages during the strike were spread on WhatsApp, a messaging service with more than one billion global users, owned by Facebook.

Under pressure

WhatsApp has also been accused of circulating false information. It came under immense pressure after the lynching of more than 20 people accused of child abduction in recent months in India, its largest market. They were sparked by false news reports.

WhatsApp took out full-page advertisements in Indian newspapers offering “easy tips” to identify fact from fiction. But the company stands by its policy of protecting the privacy of its users with encryption technology.

Google, also under pressure for spreading misinformation, announced in March that it was investing $300 million over three years to support a series of projects to tackle false information and support “credible” media organisations.

Its search engine promotes verifications carried out by fact-checking organisations.

Despite the creation of dozens of fact-checking initiatives in recent years, journalists have to run just to keep up as misinformation techniques evolve.

A relatively new development is deep fakes — manipulated videos that appear genuine but depict events or speech that never happened.

For now, deep fakes are technically difficult to create and have not yet had a big impact, but with progress they may further blur the online line between true and false.

ศาสตร์เกษตรดินปุ๋ย : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation

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US judge rules Obamacare unconstitutional, Democrats vow to appeal

ASEAN+ December 15, 2018 15:26

By Agence France-Presse 
Washington

A federal judge in Texas ruled late Friday that the US health care law known as Obamacare is unconstitutional — a ruling that opposition Democrats vowed to appeal.

US District Judge Reed O’Connor’s 55-page ruling came in a lawsuit filed by several Republican state attorneys general opposed to the federal government health plan, known officially as the Affordable Care Act.

Conservative Republicans have long opposed the plan, signed into law by president Barack Obama in 2010.

The case is likely to reach the US Supreme Court, where the five justices in the nine-judge court who voted to uphold Obamacare in a separate case in 2012 are still on the bench.

O’Connor’s ruling said that the full Obamacare program was unconstitutional because in last year’s tax overhaul, Congress eliminated a penalty for people who failed to sign up for the program if they did not already have their own health insurance.

The 2012 Supreme Court case was over whether such a penalty was legal — but now that it is gone, O’Connor says the whole Affordable Care Act should be stricken down because the provision is “the keystone” of the program.

President Donald Trump, who has long criticized Obamacare and vowed to repeal the probram, lost no time in tweeting his opinion.

“Wow, but not surprisingly, ObamaCare was just ruled UNCONSTITUTIONAL by a highly respected judge in Texas. Great news for America!” Trump wrote.

“As I predicted all along, Obamacare has been struck down as an UNCONSTITUTIONAL disaster!” he said.

Trump urged Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and likely incoming Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and to “pass a STRONG law that provides GREAT healthcare.”

‘Monstrous endgame’

Angry Democrats blamed Republicans for what they see as a debacle that will leave millions of Americans without healthcare and vowed to fight back in court.

The ruling “exposes the monstrous endgame of Republicans’ all-out assault on people with pre-existing conditions and Americans’ access to affordable health care,” Pelosi said in a statement.

While the court’s “absurd ruling will be immediately appealed, Republicans are fully responsible for this cruel decision,” she said.

For Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the ruling “seems to be based on faulty legal reasoning and hopefully it will be overturned.”

However if this “awful ruling is upheld in the higher courts, it will be a disaster for tens of millions of American families,” he said.

Opposing the lawsuit are 17 Democratic attorneys general led by Xavier Becerra of California.

They argue that the tax law changes do not mean that the whole Affordable Care Act becomes unconstitutional.

The ruling “is an assault on 133 million Americans with pre-existing conditions, on the 20 million Americans who rely on the A.C.A.’s consumer protections for health care, on America’s faithful progress toward affordable health care for all Americans,” Becerra said in a statement.

“Our fight to save Obamacare is far from over. We will continue to fight these efforts to take Americans’ healthcare away,” he tweeted.

The ruling came one day before the Saturday deadline to sign up for ACA coverage in 2019.

The White House said in a statement it expects the case to be appealed to the Supreme Court. “Pending the appeal process, the law remains in place,” the statement said.

ศาสตร์เกษตรดินปุ๋ย : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation

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Oceans of garbage prompt war on plastics

ASEAN+ December 15, 2018 15:21

By Agence France-Presse 
Paris

Faced with images of turtles smothered by plastic bags, beaches carpeted with garbage and islands of trash floating in the oceans, environmentalists say the world is waking up to the need to tackle plastic pollution at the source.

Stories on social media of giant seas of floating waste or a beached whale found in Indonesia with six kilos (13 pounds) of plastic in its stomach are bringing plastic pollution into the spotlight.

“There is no question plastic is having a moment,” said George Leonard, chief scientist at Ocean Conservancy.

“We are in a moment in time where we are starting to stare the problem in the face, and we’re quite optimistic and hopeful that we can solve it.”

Leonard and other environmental experts are optimistic the exposure will make the problem of plastics hard to ignore and focus attention on how best to deal with such waste.

Eight million tonnes of plastic is dumped into the oceans each year, according to a study in the Science journal.

But that is only what comes from the land, said Francois Galgani, researcher with the French institute Ifremer, estimating another two million tonnes could come from ships especially fishing vessels.

As a consequence more than 700 species are impacted, including turtles who confuse plastic bags with the jellyfish they eat, Galgani said.

More than 5 billion plastic bags are used every year, and a ban step by step, country by country is underway, the first phase towards a possible general ban. Bags could be followed by bans on plastic straws and cotton swabs.

The European Union wants to ban certain single-use plastics by the end of 2021. For Galgani, that would be good news, as it would represent around 30 to 40 percent of the plastic that ends up in the oceans.

“Everyone is working for the good cause, even industries,” he said.

Cleaning up?

But according to a study in Science Advances review, from the 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic produced between 1950 and 2015, 6.3 billion tonnes became garbage that was not very biodegradable material and only 9 percent was recycled.

For Greenpeace’s Mirjam Kopp, though, recycling is not enough.

“We cannot continue this business as usual, we need to change the throw-away culture we have developed,” Kopp said. “We need to tackle the problem at the source.

“Industries are putting the blame on the consumers, saying they should recycle more, but we don’t think it will help. They are responsible for the single-use plastics they put on the market.”

The UN Environment agency has already declared war on plastics in the oceans and made it the environmental theme of 2018.

“We need stop treating plastic as something that we can just throw away after we have used it, and start treating it as a material that has real value,” said Petter Malvik, campaign manager for the Clean Seas campaign launched by UN-Environment in 2017.

Already around 60 countries have joined in the campaign started in 2017 to ban non-reusable plastics.

“Although bans alone won’t solve the problem, they are definitely more than just a drop in the bucket,” Malvik said.

Another problem is so called “ghost nets” – fishing nets lost at sea or left intentionally and which continue to catch fish for months after.

When it comes to cleaning the oceans, though, experts say the task may be far more complex. Scientists, for example, have doubts for over a giant floating clean-up device proposed by Ocean Cleanup foundation, which aims to clear half of a huge waste deposit floating in the Pacific in the next five years.

Dubbed the “Great Pacific garbage patch”, the abnormal mass of floating debris caused by marine turbulence has now reached 80,000 tonnes spread over an area three times the size of France, according to a study in Scientific Reports.

And if you want to clean up the ocean, Leonard says, then the surface is not the place to start.

What floats on the surface — particles of micro-plastics and larger objects — is nothing compared to what ends up on the ocean floor, experts say.

So what is the solution? “Degradation,” says Galgani of France’s Iremer institute, referring to the breakdown of plastics. But for some plastics that means a process that may take “hundreds of years”.

ศาสตร์เกษตรดินปุ๋ย : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation

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Eleven die after eating ‘toxic’ rice at Indian temple

ASEAN+ December 15, 2018 14:39

By Agence France-Presse 
New Delhi

Eleven people have died after eating rice that had likely been contaminated with a toxic substance at a Hindu temple ceremony, a health official said Saturday.

Another 29 people were critically ill and undergoing emergency treatment across various hospitals in Mysore, a city in the state of Karnataka.

“11 people have died so far and 93 others are hospitalised. Out of them, 29 are on ventilator support,” said K. H. Prasad, the health officer for Chamraj Nagar district where the temple is located.

“It is likely that some toxic substance got mixed with the rice. The samples have been sent for forensic testing,” Prasad told AFP.

The patients were being treated for vomiting, diarrhoea and respiratory distress, Prasad added.

According to the police, devotees had gathered in large numbers at the Kicchukatti Maramma temple for the consecration ceremony on Friday, after which rice was served as a sanctified offering.

Murugappa, a devotee who was present at the temple, said they were offered tomato rice and flavoured water.

“A foul smell was emanating from the food, but those at the head of the queue consumed the food nonetheless,” he was quoted as saying by the NDTV news network.

“A little while later they started vomiting and frothing at the mouth.”

State Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy expressed grief over the incident and announced a compensation of 500,000 rupees (around $7,000) each to the families of the victims.

India’s religious festivals are often badly managed with police and volunteer stewards overwhelmed by the sheer size of the crowds.

A stampede in eastern West Bengal state last year killed six women and 24 people died in a similar incident in Uttar Pradesh state in 2016.

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Australia recognises west Jerusalem as capital of Israel

ASEAN+ December 15, 2018 14:22

By Agence France-Presse 
Sydney

Australia now recognises west Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Saturday, but a contentious embassy shift from Tel Aviv will not occur until a peace settlement is achieved.

Canberra became one of just a few governments around the world to follow US President Donald Trump’s lead and recognise the contested city as Israel’s capital, but Morrison also committed to recognising a future state of Palestine with east Jerusalem as its capital.

“Australia now recognises west Jerusalem — being the seat of the Knesset and many of the institutions of government — is the capital of Israel,” Morrison said in a speech in Sydney.

Both Israel and the Palestinians claim Jerusalem as their capital.

Most foreign nations avoided moving embassies there to prevent inflaming peace talks on the city’s final status — until Trump unilaterally moved the US embassy there earlier this year.

“We look forward to moving our embassy to west Jerusalem when practical, in support of and after final status of determination,” Morrison said, adding that work on a new site for the embassy was under way.

In the interim, the prime minister said, Australia would establish a defence and trade office in the west of the holy city.

“Furthermore, recognising our commitment to a two-state solution, the Australian government is also resolved to acknowledge the aspirations of the Palestinian people for a future state with its capital in east Jerusalem,” he added.

Morrison first floated a shift in foreign policy in October, which angered Australia’s immediate neighbour Indonesia — the world’s most populous Muslim nation.

The issue has put a halt on years-long negotiations on a bilateral trade deal.

Canberra on Friday told its citizens travelling to Indonesia to “exercise a high degree of caution”, warning of protests in the capital Jakarta and popular holiday hotspots, including Bali.

Morrison pointed to Australia’s military history in the region, and the country’s interest in a “rules-based” order in the Middle East, to support the shift in foreign policy.

The prime minister vowed Australia would no longer abstain from UN resolutions he said “attacked” Israel, but would instead oppose them, including the “Jerusalem” resolution, which asks nations not to locate diplomatic missions to the holy city.

“The UN General Assembly is now the place where Israel is bullied and where anti-Semitism is cloaked in language about human rights,” Morrison said.

‘All risk and no gain’

The Jerusalem decision could help the embattled Australian PM — who faces the prospect of an election drubbing next year — with Jewish and conservative Christian voters and win him friends in the White House.

The opposition Labor party slammed Morrison for putting “self-interest ahead of the national interest”.

“Recognising West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, while continuing to locate Australia’s embassy in Tel Aviv, is nothing more than a face saving exercise,” shadow minister for foreign affairs Penny Wong said in a statement.

“This is a decision which is all risk and no gain,” she said, adding it puts Australia “out of step” with the international community.

Trump’s decision to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv last May prompted tens of thousands of Palestinian protesters to approach the heavily-protected Israeli border. At least 62 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire that day.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has previously hailed Morrison’s initiative.

The Palestinian government will press for Arab and Muslim states to “withdraw their ambassadors” and take some “meat and wheat” style “economic boycott measures” over Canberra’s decision, Palestinian ambassador to Australia Izzat Abdulhadi told AFP Friday.

The Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN) on Saturday said Morrison’s move “serves no Australian interest”.

“This sabotages any real possibility for a future just agreement and further emboldens Israel to continue with its daily human rights violations of Palestinians,” APAN president Bishop George Browning said in a statement.

ศาสตร์เกษตรดินปุ๋ย : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation

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Members of the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice protest ahead of the final session of the COP24 summit on climate change in Katowice, Poland, on December 14, 2018. (Photo by Janek SKARZYNSKI / AFP)

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