Sri Lanka: 9 Muslim Ministers, 2 Governors step down in protest against demonization of community

News Network
June 4, 2019

Colombo, Jun 4: Nine Muslim Ministers in Sri Lanka — including four of Cabinet rank — resigned on Monday, taking a collective stand against the community being “demonised” since the Easter Sunday terror attacks.

The move will give the authorities “space and time” to probe allegations linking Muslim politicians to the terror suspects, Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC) leader Rauff Hakeem told journalists. “Either they should apprehend and punish any of us found guilty, or they must vindicate us. We hope they will look into this in a month and bring some closure to this,” he said.

“The survival of the government will depend on the manner in which it handles the probe and deals with hate speech, racial violence and impunity,” he said.

‘Innocent victimised’

“Innocent Muslims are at the receiving end…they are being victimised despite the community unequivocally condemning the heinous terror attacks,” he added.

Earlier, the Muslim Governors of the Eastern and Western Provinces, M.L.A.M. Hizbullah and Azath Salley, stepped down, days after a prominent Buddhist monk began a fast demanding that they resign in connection with the April 21 bombings that killed over 250 people.The monk, Athuraliye Rathana Thero, is a parliamentarian from the ruling United National Party (UNP), led by Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. Rathana Thero began fasting on Friday, in front of the iconic Buddhist temple Dalada Maligawa in Kandy, with five demands, including the resignation of Minister Rishad Bathiudeen, and Governors A.L.A.M. Hizbullah and Azath Salley, accused of having links to Easter attack suspects. The politicians have denied the allegations.

President Maithripala Sirisena’s office said on Monday that he accepted the resignation letters of the two Governors, of the island’s Eastern and Western Provinces.

Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, executive director of the Colombo-based NGO Centre for Policy Alternatives, said Buddhist priests fasting unto death were effectively “holding the country to ransom”, when “there are laws, there are due processes that should apply in these situations.” Further, Monday’s developments showed that an ethnic community’s political representation was “holding together and willing to sacrifice a certain amount of political power”, he told The Hindu . If the Muslim community’s political power is relegated to a secondary status in the wake of concerns around national security, he said the country might be heading for a politics that had no place for “an expression of unity in diversity.”

Tamil National Alliance spokesman M.A. Sumanthiran said it was “most unfortunate that Muslim Ministers succumbed to pressure from racists.” “Yesterday us, today you, tomorrow a new ‘other’. We continue to stand in solidarity with Muslim people & call on all right thinking SriLankans to do the same,” he tweeted.

Support for monk

Meanwhile, thousands marched to Kandy on Monday, in support of the monk.

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Agencies
June 7,2020

Boston, Jun 7: Dozens of scientists doing research funded by Mark Zuckerberg say Facebook should not be letting President Donald Trump use of the social media platform to spread both misinformation and incendiary statements.

The researchers, including 60 professors at leading US research institutions, wrote a letter to the Facebook CEO on Saturday asking that he consider stricter policies on misinformation and incendiary language that harms people," especially during the current turmoil over racial injustice.

The letter calls the spread of deliberate misinformation and divisive language the researchers' goal of using technology to prevent and eradicate disease, improving childhood education and reform the criminal justice system.

The researchers' mission "is antithetical to some of the stances that Facebook has been taking, so we're encouraging them to be more on the side of truth and on the right side of history as we've said in the letter, said Debora Marks of Harvard Medical School, one of three professors who organized the letter.

The other organisers are Martin Kampmann of the University of California-San Francisco and Jason Shepherd of the University of Utah.

All have grants from a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative program working to prevent, cure and treat neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. The initiative is run by Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

They said the letter had more than 160 signatories. Shepherd said about 10% are employees of Chan Zuckerberg foundations.

The letter objects specifically to Zuckerberg's decision not to at least flag as a violation of Facebook's community standards Trump's post that stated when the looting starts, the shooting starts after unrest in Minneapolis over the videotaped killing of George Floyd, a black man, by a white police officer.

The letter's authors called the post a clear statement of inciting violence.

Twitter had both flagged and demoted a Trump tweet using the same language.

The Associated Press emailed the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative press office for comment. It did not immediately respond.

Some Facebook employees have publicly objected to Zuckerberg's refusal to take down or label misleading or incendiary posts by Trump or other politicians. But Zuckerberg who controls a majority of voting shares in the company has so far refused.

On Friday, Zuckerberg said in a post that he would review potential options for handling violating or partially-violating content aside from the binary leave-it-up or take-it-down decisions I know many of you think we should have labeled the President's posts in some way last week, he wrote.

"Our current policy is that if content is actually inciting violence, then the right mitigation is to take that content down not let people continue seeing it behind a flag. There is no exception to this policy for politicians or newsworthiness.

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Agencies
January 20,2020

Wuhan, Jan 20: A 45-year-old Indian woman has become the first foreigner in China to have contracted a mysterious virus, which is suspected to be Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)-like corona virus.

In 2002-2003, the SARS corona virus killed around 650 people in China and Hong Kong. This time, a new strain of virus with 62 cases have been reported in Wuhan and two in Shenzhen so far. 19 patients have been already cured and discharged, as per the Chinese media.

Official sources in Beijing said that the patient, Preeti Maheshwari, a school teacher at an international school, is undergoing treatment for the new strain of pneumonia outbreak, which has been spreading in two major cities of China - Wuhan and Shenzen. She has been on a ventilator in the intensive care unit.

Maheshwari was admitted to a local hospital after she seriously fell ill last Friday. Her husband, a businessman from Delhi, is allowed to visit her daily.

Following a second death due to the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan, India on Friday issued an advisory to its nationals travelling to China. Over 500 Indian medical students are studying in Wuhan.

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News Network
February 18,2020

Beijing, Feb 18: Police in China have arrested a prominent activist who had been a fugitive for weeks and criticised President Xi Jinping's handling of the coronavirus epidemic while in hiding, a rights group said Tuesday.

Anti-corruption activist Xu Zhiyong was arrested on Saturday after being on the run since December, according to Amnesty International.

China's ruling Communist Party has severely curtailed civil liberties since Xi took power in 2012, rounding up rights lawyers, labour activists and even Marxist students.

The death this month of a whistleblowing doctor who was reprimanded by police for raising the alarm about the deadly new virus before dying of it himself triggered rare calls for political reform and freedom of speech.

The "Chinese government's battle against the coronavirus has in no way diverted it from its ongoing general campaign to crush all dissenting voices," said Patrick Poon, China researcher at Amnesty International, in an emailed statement.

Another source, who spoke to news agency on the condition of anonymity, said Xu had been arrested in the southern city of Guangzhou.

Guangzhou police did not respond to requests for comment.

Xu went into hiding after authorities broke up a December gathering of intellectuals discussing political reform in the eastern coastal city of Xiamen in Fujian province, prior to the coronavirus crisis.

Over a dozen lawyers and activists were detained or disappeared after the Xiamen gathering, according to rights groups -- and Xu's detention appears linked to his presence at the meeting, explained Poon.

But while on the run, Xu continued to post information on Twitter about rights issues.

On February 4 Xu released an article calling on Xi to step down and criticised his leadership across a range of issues including the US-China trade war, Hong Kong's pro-democracy protests and the coronavirus epidemic, which has now killed nearly 1,900 people.

"Medical supplies are tight, hospitals are filled with patients, and a large number of infected people have no way to be diagnosed," he wrote. "It's a mess."

"The coronavirus outbreak shows just how important values like freedom of expression and transparency are -- the exact values that Xu has long advocated," Yaqiu Wang, China researcher at Human Rights Watch, told news agency.

But the disappearance of Xu illustrates how the Chinese state "persists in its old ways" by "silencing its critics", she said.

Xu -- who founded a movement calling for greater transparency among high-ranking officials -- previously served a four-year prison sentence from 2013 to 2017 for organising an "illegal gathering".

"That he was a fugitive for so many days while continuing to speak out, that in itself was... a kind of challenge to (Chinese authorities)," said Hua Ze, a long-time friend of Xu who told AFP she lost contact with the Chinese activist on Saturday morning.

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