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-Lindsey Parnaby / AFP

PAGE 03GLOCAL

GOVT. DECLARES ALL DAY COUNTRYWIDE CURFEW

FOR SUNDAY

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PAGE 08SRI LANKA FOCUSPAGE 02BUSINESS PAGE 06COMMENTARY

SCAPEGOATING THE MUSLIMS

UNSEEN AND UNTOLD COVID-19 STORIES

MAYMAY15 - 17, 202015 - 17, 2020

SRI LANKA HALTS DIVIDENDS, PROFIT REPATRIATION, SHARE

BUY BACKS BY BANKS

A woman wearing a face mask sits on a bench in Sheffield, northern England yesterday (14), following an easing of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 lockdown guidelines. London’s ‘Square Mile’ financial district said it will close some streets to cars to create more space for pedestrians and cyclists so that workers can observe social distancing when the coronavirus lockdown is lifted. Britain began easing restrictions this week but said people

who can work from home should continue to do so, as most financial sector staff have been doing since March. The financial district is home to the Bank of England, the London Stock Exchange and Lloyd’s of London insurance market, and many of its pavements are too narrow for the 522,000 people who work there to maintain safe social distancing, a report for City of London councilors said. It proposed widening pavements, and shutting some roads

to cars completely or during business hours, which a panel of the City’s councilors approved yesterday. But 74� of commuter journeys to the City are longer than 10km (6 miles), making public transport the only feasible option for many. Separately, London’s transport system said it was increasing services over the next week but capacity would be cut to about 15� to maintain social distancing for passengers

UN warns of global mental health crisis due to COVID-19 pandemic LONDON - A mental illness cri-sis is looming as millions of people worldwide are surrounded by death and disease and forced into isolation, poverty and anxiety by the pandemic of COVID-19, United Nations health experts said yesterday (14).

“The isolation, the fear, the uncer-tainty, the economic turmoil - they all cause or could cause psychological distress,” said DevoraKestel, director of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) mental health department.

Presenting a UN report and policy guidance on COVID-19 and men-tal health, Kestel said an upsurge in the number and severity of mental illnesses is likely, and governments

should put the issue “front and cen-tre” of their responses.

“The mental health and wellbeing of whole societies have been severely impacted by this crisis and are a pri-ority to be addressed urgently,” she told reporters at a briefing.

The report highlighted several re-gions and sections of societies as vul-nerable to mental distress - including children and young people isolated from friends and school, healthcare workers who are seeing thousands of patients infected with and dying from the new coronavirus.

Emerging studies and surveys are already showing COVID-19’s impact on mental health globally. Psycholo-

gists say children are anxious and increases in cases of depression and anxiety have been recorded in several countries.

Domestic violence is rising, and health workers are reporting an in-creased need for psychological sup-port. Reuters last week reported from interviews with doctors and nurses in the United States who said either they or their colleagues had experienced a combination of panic, anxiety, grief, numbness, irritability, insomnia and nightmares.

Outside of the health sector, the WHO report said many people are distressed by the immediate health impacts and the consequences of

physical isolation, while many others are afraid of infection, dying, and los-ing family members.

Millions of people are facing eco-nomic turmoil, having lost or being at risk of losing their income and livelihoods, it added. And frequent misinformation and rumours about the pandemic and deep uncertainty about how long it will last are mak-ing people feel anxious and hopeless about the future.

It outlined action points for policy-makers to aim “to reduce immense suffering among hundreds of millions of people and mitigate long-term so-cial and economic costs to society”.

-Agencies

First coronavirus cases found in Rohingya refugee camps COX’S BAZAR - Two Rohingya have become the first to test positive for coronavirus from the vast refugee camps in Bangladesh that house almost a million people, offi-cials said yesterday (14).

Health experts have been warning for some time that the virus could race through the sprawling, unsanitary camps that have been home to the refugees since they fled a military offensive in Myanmar more than two years ago.

Local health coordinator Abu TohaBhuiyan said the two refugees had been put into isolation, and authori-ties stepped up prevention measures and were scaling up testing.

In early April authorities imposed a complete lockdown on the surrounding Cox's Bazar district after a number of cases, restricting all traffic in and out of the camps.

Bangladesh authorities also forced aid organizations to slash their camp presence by 80%.

Rights groups and activists have expressed concerns that the camps are hotspots of misinformation about the pandemic because of an internet ban imposed last Sep-tember.

The first coronavirus case was confirmed in Bangla-desh in early March, and the pandemic has since wors-ened with at least 283 people dead and nearly 19,000 infected - figures some experts say are highly under-re-ported.

The government has enforced a nationwide lockdown since March 26 in an effort to check the spread of the disease.

Despite the shutdown, the number of cases has risen sharply in recent days and the daily death toll and new infections hit a record on Wednesday.

-AFP

WTO chief quits suddenly, adding to global turmoil FRANKFURT — The head of the or-ganization charged with bringing a sem-blance of order to international trade re-lations resigned unexpectedly yesterday (14), adding another element of uncer-tainty to commerce in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and escalating trade conflicts.

Roberto Azevêdo, a career Brazilian diplomat, resigned as the director-gen-eral of the World Trade Organization (WTO) effective Aug. 31, the Geneva-based organization said. His second four-year term was not scheduled to end until September 2021.

The WTO’s operations have been crip-pled since late last year as a result of actions by the Trump administration, which has refused to approve nominees to fill vacancies on a crucial appeals panel that rules on trade disputes. With Azevêdo’s departure, which caught offi-cials in Geneva and Brussels by surprise,

the organization will lose an advocate of open trade and international coopera-tion whose views clashed with President Donald Trump’s preference for bilat-eral power politics. Azevêdo, 62, did not link his departure to tensions with the Trump administration. Rather, he said he wanted to give WTO members a head start on choosing a successor, which is often a difficult process.

The coronavirus pandemic has brought complex negotiations on issues such as fishing subsidies to a standstill and made it unlikely that agreements will be reached before next year. A debate at the same time about the next WTO di-rector would interfere with attempts to overcome trade disputes, Azevêdo said.

“The selection process would be a dis-traction from — or worse, a disruption to — our desired outcomes,” he said during an online meeting with WTO members.

-NYT

Emoluments suit against Trump to proceed WASHINGTON — A federal ap-peals court in Virginia ruled yes-terday (14) that a lawsuit accusing President Donald Trump of violat-ing the Constitution by profiting from his Washington hotel can pro-ceed. The decision will most likely lead the Justice Department to ask the Supreme Court to intervene to prevent the plaintiffs from gathering evidence against the president.

“We recognize that the president is no ordinary petitioner, and we ac-cord him great deference as the head of the executive branch,” the decision by the 4th US Circuit Court of Ap-peals states. “But Congress and the Supreme Court have severely limited our ability to grant the extraordinary relief the president seeks.”

The 15-member appeals court in Richmond met in December to con-sider whether a three-judge appel-late panel had wrongly dismissed the lawsuit over the Trump Internation-

al Hotel brought by the District of Columbia and the state of Maryland. The local jurisdictions were about to begin evidence-gathering when the panel ruled for the president.

The local jurisdictions argue that Trump is illegally accepting benefits from government officials who pa-tronize his hotel, in violation of the emoluments clauses of the Consti-tution. Their lawyers asked the full appellate court to let the lawsuit go forward.

But the Justice Department law-yers told the appellate judges that they should let the case die, arguing that without the express authoriza-tion of Congress, the president can-not be sued for violating the emolu-ments bans. Alternatively, they said the court should order the district court judge who was overseeing the case to allow an emergency appeal of his rulings.

-NYT

COVID-19 and curfew in Sri Lanka • Ten people were confirmed as COVID-19 positive yes-terday (14) taking Sri Lanka’s tally of the novel corona-virus infection to 925. Twenty two cases were confirmed late Wednesday (13) night, taking the day’s tally to 26. Four hundred seventy one individuals are receiving treatment, 445 have been deemed completely recovered and nine have succumbed to the virus.• Government declares an island-wide curfew effective 8:00 p.m. Saturday (16) until 5:00 Monday (18).• Curfew to continue in the Colombo and Gampaha Dis-tricts till further notice.• Government announces the mechanism to recom-mence civilian life and economic activities, introduced on Monday (11) while curfew is in force will continue till Saturday and resume from Monday (18) onwards.• The Minister of Civil Aviation Minister PrasannaRana-tunga says the government has worked out a roadmap for reopening the Bandaranaike International Airport for inbound and outbound passengers with guidelines that include the setting up of a laboratory to test them for COVID-19.• The Health Ministry says Sri Lanka is closely monitor-ing increasing cases of a Kawasaki-like disease spreading among children in Europe and in the West and although no cases had been reported here, they would continue to study the pattern of the disease.• NIC last digit based system - those who have 8 and 9 as the last digit can walk to nearby shop for purchase of essential items, but not drive.• Those with suspected COVID-19 symptoms are urged to call 1390 - emergency hotline- set up for free medical ad-vice and assistance, and to facilitate hospital admissions.

297,259 deaths at 1100 GMT yesterdayPARIS - The novel coronavirus has killed at least 297,259 people since the outbreak first emerged in China last December, according to a tally from official sources compiled by AFP at 1100 GMT yesterday (14).

At least 4,362,090 cases of coronavirus have been reg-istered in 196 countries and territories. Of these, at least 1,514,600 are now considered recovered.

The tallies, using data collected by AFP from national authorities and information from the World Health Or-ganization (WHO), probably reflect only a fraction of the actual number of infections.

Many countries are testing only the most serious cases.Over the past 24 hours, 5,259 deaths and 89,210 new

cases have been recorded. The United States has the highest number of to-

tal deaths with 84,136 from 1,390,764 cases. At least 243,430 have been declared recovered.

Britain has the second-highest toll with 33,186 deaths from 229,705 cases.

It is followed by Italy with 31,106 deaths and 222,104 cases, Spain with 27,321 deaths and 229,540 infections and France with 27,074 fatalities and 178,060 cases.

China - excluding Hong Kong and Macau - has to date declared 4,633 deaths and 82,929 cases. It has 78,195 re-covered cases.

Europe has a total of 161,406 deaths from 1,815,627 cases, the United States and Canada have 89,545 deaths and 1,463,042 cases, Latin America and the Caribbean have 24,355 deaths and 426,321 cases, Asia has 11,449 deaths and 327,360 cases, the Middle East has 7,888 deaths and 248,664 cases, Africa has 2,490 deaths from 72,746 cases, and Oceania 126 deaths from 8,330 cases.

Corrections by national authorities or late publication of data mean the figures updated over the past 24 hours may not correspond exactly to the previous day's tallies.

-AFP

Coronavirus toll

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Syria: The World Food Program says a record 9.3 million people are now food insecure in the country as spiralling prices and the coronavi-rus pandemic compound the dam-age of a nine-year war.

Afghanistan: The Taliban takes credit for deadly attack on an army base after the government ordered forces to resume strikes against the militants.

USA: Sen. Richard M. Burr, R-N., temporarily steps down as chair-man of the Senate Intelligence Committee, a day after FBI agents seized his cell phone as part of an investigation into whether he sold hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of stocks using non-public information about the coronavirus.

- President Donald Trump says he does not want to talk to his Chi-nese counterpart, and muses about ending the world's largest trading relationship, amid rising tensions about the coronavirus pandemic.Brazil: President Jair Bolsonaro urges regional and local authorities to open up the economy, despite COVID-19 infections hitting a new record in the country.Ukraine: Authorities say more than 100 babies born to surrogate mothers are stranded in the coun-try as their foreign parents cannot collect them due to border closures imposed during the coronavirus pandemic.UK: A spokesman confirms the British government will alter immi-gration rules for Northern Ireland,

after a landmark case challenged regulations over residency rights in the province.France: Valery Giscard d'Estaing’s lawyer says the country’s oldest surviving former president is "very upset" by an accusation of sexual assault made by a German journal-ist and has no recollection of such an incident.Canada: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announces can$ 470 mil-lion (US$330 million) in pandemic aid for fishermen, saying: "You can't harvest lobster from inside your house."Israel: The country postpones the swearing-in of its long-awaited uni-ty government, following a request for a three-day delay by Prime Min-ister Benjamin Netanyahu.

2 MAY 15 - 17, 2020 WEEKEND EXPRESS

BUSINESSBUSINESS

COLOMBO - Brandix, a top apparel group said it had started shipping 200 million face masks to made at its fac-tories to support the United States in its battle against Coronavirus.

Basil Rajapaksa, brother of Sri Lan-ka’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa had made a symbolic presentation of a batch of masks to US Ambassador Alaina B Teplitz.

The fabric was produced in Sri Lan-ka and ingredients of a coating on the mask that kills germs were brought from the US.

“As the world combats this global pandemic, the long friendship be-tween the United States and Sri Lanka is helping both our countries over-come this challenge,” Ambassador Teplitz was quoted as saying.

“We look forward to continuing our cooperation with the Sri Lankan gov-ernment and Brandix to sustain the global supply of PPE.”

Brandix had re-oriented a factory Teejay Lanka, which made fabric for lingerie and other apparel to the US and other markets before the Corona-virus epidemic to produce mask fab-ric.

“This collaboration between the two countries has resulted in sustain-ing our national economy, in addition to paving way for global customers to reach out to Sri Lanka for quality products in the months ahead,” Basil Rajapaksa had said.

“We are glad that a leader in apparel like Brandix utilized its resources to lead the way in this journey, giving the global market a glimpse of the ad-vanced infrastructure and agility that is already in place within Sri Lanka, in order to meet the current and future market demands.”

About 15,000 of Bradix’s 30,000 strong workforce is now involved in mask making.

The face masks, produced as 3-ply and of cotton-based fabric with an-timicrobial finish, is stretchable for better fit and meet stringent hygiene standards, the company said.

“The apparel industry is a key ex-port revenue generator in Sri Lanka, generating $5.6 billion of exports in the last fiscal year itself,” RangaRan-madugala – Board Member of Bran-dix Apparel Limited said.

“However, the unavoidable decline in trade and production output result-ing from the COVID-19 crisis, has left the industry facing its toughest pre-dicament in recent times, impacting Sri Lanka’s positioning against other apparel export markets.

“Despite the challenging conditions and the tough road ahead, the indus-try will continue to do its part to com-bat potential long-term impacts of the pandemic and bring in revenue to re-plenish the national economy.”

Sri Lanka’s National Medical Reg-ulatory Authority (NMRA) initially slapped price controls in a knee jerk reaction worsening shortages while also banning exports following in the footsteps of nationalists in other countries, critics have said.

-economynext.com

COLOMBO– SriLankan Airlines said it had carried 45 tonnes of sup-plies including seven million masks to South Africa from China to help the country’s battle against coronavirus.

The cargo was carried from Beijing and Guangzhou in China to O R Tam-bo International Airport – Johannes-burg.

Three SriLankan Airlines long haul A330 aircraft were involved in the air-lift.

Cargo capacity had been boosted with cabin loading, the airline said.

Each seat can carry around 60 kilo-grams of cargo in place of a human passenger.

The aircraft had landed in Colombo, refuelled, changed the crew and flew to South Africa.

SriLankan Airlines is one of the few airlines operating in the region.

-economynext.com

Brandix ships 200mn face mask to the US

SriLanka airlifts 7mn face masks to South Africa

Malaysia drops charges against ‘Wolf of Wall Street' producer KUALA LUMPUR - Malaysian prosecu-tors dropped yesterday (14) 1MDB-linked charges against one of the producers of Hol-lywood hit ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ after he struck a deal that should see authorities re-cover over $100 million.

Riza Aziz, who is also the stepson of the country's disgraced ex-leader NajibRazak, was charged with money laundering in July for allegedly receiving nearly $250 mil-lion from Malaysia's sovereign wealth fund 1MDB.

Billions of dollars were looted from the fund and spent on everything from a yacht to pricey art in a huge fraud that spanned the globe, and allegedly involved Najib and his cronies.

But a judge agreed to give Riza a discharge not amounting to an acquittal -- meaning the charges have been dropped -- after he agreed a settlement with authorities, pros-ecutor Ahmad AkramGharib told AFP.

Malaysia's anti-corruption commission said the government was expected to recover overseas assets linked to the crime estimated to be worth $107.3 million.

The commission stressed that his release was "conditional," adding: "The prosecution

reserves the rights to reinstate the charges and prosecute the accused if there is no sat-isfactory completion of the agreement."

Riza had been accused of receiving $248.17 million in 2011 and 2012 in illegal proceeds that came from 1MDB.

The money was sent to bank accounts of Hollywood production company Red Gran-ite Pictures, which Riza co-founded.

Aside from "The Wolf of Wall Street", which was about a huge financial scam and starred Leonardo DiCaprio, Red Granite also produced the Jim Carrey movie "Dumb and Dumber To" and "Daddy's Home". Najib was voted out of power in 2018 in large part due to public anger at the 1MDB scandal, and has since been put on trial over the mammoth fraud. He denies any wrongdoing.

The alliance that ousted Najib, led by 94-year-old Mahathir Mohamad, reopened investigations into the scandal and started clawing back looted money. But Mahathir's government itself lost power earlier this year and was replaced by an administration that includes Najib's party, raising questions about whether criminal proceedings linked to the controversy will continue.

-AFP

Sri Lanka

Infotainment

COLOMBO– The Central Bank of Sri Lanka has halted banks from declaring div-idends and foreign banks from repatriating profits under new regulations which it said was to conserve liquidity until December 2020, amid a coronavirus outbreak.

“Licensed banks incorporated or estab-lished in Sri Lanka shall refrain from de-claring cash dividends not already declared for financial year 2019 and any interim cash dividends for financial year 2020,” the central bank said in a direction. “Li-censed commercial banks incorporated

outside Sri Lanka shall refrain from repa-triation of profits not already declared for financial years 2019 and 2020.”

Share buybacks have also been banned, as have wage hikes or allowances to man-agement or directors.

The central bank has injected unprece-dented volumes of money in to the banking system from late February before private credit fell, leading to a loss of credibility in the currency and downgrades.Extracts from the direction:

2.2 These Directions shall come in to ef-

fect immediately and be applicable until December 31, 2020.

3.1 Licensed banks incorporated or es-tablished in Sri Lanka shall refrain from declaring cash dividends not already de-clared for financial year 2019 and any interim cash dividends for financial year 2020.

3.2 Licensed commercial banks incorpo-rated outside Sri Lanka shall refrain from repatriation of profits not already declared for financial years 2019 and 2020.

3.3 Licensed banks shall refrain from

buying-back its own shares.3.4 Licensed banks shall refrain from in-

creasing management allowances and pay-ments to Board of Directors.

“3.5 Licensed banks shall exercise pru-dence and refrain to the extent possible from incurring non-essential expenditure such as advertising, business promotions, sponsorships, travelling and training,etc…”

3.6 Licensed banks shall exercise ex-treme due diligence and prudence when incurring capital expenditure, if any.”

-economynext.com

Sri Lanka halts dividends, profit repatriation, share buy backs by banks

Govt. confirms there won’t be private sector layoffs due to COVID-19

Treasuries yields down, no money printing visible

Global stocks sink as recovery worries and second virus wave rise

Gilt yields close flat

COLOMBO - Mitra Innovation has announced its partnership with Creatio (formerly bpm’online), a leading low-code, process automation and CRM company. Founder and CEO Mitra Innovation, Dr Ashok Suppiah said the company chose Creatio be-cause they are market leaders in CRM with low-code and Business Process Management. “The Creatio partner program complements Mitra’s offerings by providing rapid innovative service to our customers,” he said in a statement.

Mitra Innovation is a Digital Advancement com-pany that helps their customers stay ahead by har-nessing the power of digital and cloud technologies. “We guide them through the rapidly evolving tech-nology landscape and exploit the latest tech to deliv-

er an outstanding customer experience. We unlock the potential in their data and help securely manage, control and exploit it. We enable our customers to in-novate, scale and grow their business. In short we’d love to explore the challenges and opportunities your business faces and how Mitra could assist,” said CEO Mitra Digital, Chinthi Weerasinghe.

Dr Suppiah said sharing common values of excel-lence, expertise and innovation; Mitra Innovation and Creatio were committed to empowering clients with intelligent platforms such as CRMs and busi-ness process management. These help businesses manage the complete customer journey and acceler-ate sales, marketing, services and operations, he said adding that with the SaaS market to surpass $278

billion by 2021, intelligent business process manage-ment and CRM solutions will accelerate the digital transformation of companies.

“This provides them with the needed level of agility and flexibility to constantly reinvent their organisa-tions in order to meet the needs of the ever-demand-ing digitally native customers.”

Creatio envisions the world where any business idea can be automated in minutes. To embrace this concept, the company provides top-notch, low-code process management and CRM platforms for organi-zations to grow and scale. Unlike traditional CRM systems, Creatio allows businesses to accelerate key processes quickly and easily, equipping companies with the agility needed to constantly test different

approaches and define the most efficient ways of communicating with clients.

Global Channel Director at Creatio, Alex Donchuk said in the current highly competitive business en-vironment, more and more companies were de-manding intelligent solutions for CRM and business process management to help them streamline cus-tomer-facing processes and gain a genuine competi-tive advantage to boost profits and more effectively engage their customers. “With a strategic alliance of Mitra Innovation and Creatio, more businesses worldwide will have an opportunity to benefit from the top-notch intelligent tools designed to stream-line, orchestrate and accelerate key business pro-cesses,” – he added.

US job losses mount even with reopening WASHINGTON - Scattershot reopening of retail stores, nail salons and restaurants around the country have not halted the flood of layoffs, with the government reporting yesterday (14) that nearly three million peo-ple filed unemployment claims last week, bringing the two-month tally to more than 36 million.

Although the weekly count of new claims has been declining since late March, job loss-es from the coronavirus pandemic continue to mount. The Labour Department said last week that the official unemployment rate in April might have been close to 20% if not for data-collection errors.

“This is a very protracted, painful situa-tion for the labour market,” said RubeelaFa-rooqi, chief US economist at High Frequency Economics, “and I just don’t see anything positive.”

As shelter-in-place restrictions have been rolled back in roughly half of the states, some employees are being called back to work. But because of lags in data on those receiv-ing jobless benefits after their initial claims, the extent of rehiring is not reflected in the latest Labour Department report. Michelle Meyer, head of US economics at Bank of

America, said that even with the reopening, she doubted that call backs to work outnum-bered additional layoffs from other sectors. The slowdown has been rippling beyond the early shutdowns in retail and hospitality to professional business services, manufactur-ing and health care.

“In a sense, it’s a rolling shock,” she said.State unemployment insurance and emer-

gency federal relief were supposed to tide households over during the shutdown. But several states have a backlog of claims, and applicants continue to complain of being un-able to reach overloaded state agencies.

According to a poll for The New York Times in early May by the online research firm SurveyMonkey, more than half of those applying for unemployment benefits in re-cent weeks were unsuccessful.

And 13 states have yet to fully put in place the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance that Congress passed in March to help free-lancers, the self-employed and other work-ers not normally eligible for state jobless benefits. Some of those being called back to work have never seen a penny of govern-ment aid.

-New York Times

COLOMBO- The Private sector Employ-ers’ Union has agreed not to terminate any employee due to the financial crisis created in the country by COVID-19 pan-demic, Co-Cabinet Spokesman Bandula-Gunawardena said at yesterday’s cabinet briefing.

He said the agreement had been reached following lengthy discussions between the Minister of Foreign Relations, Skills Devel-opment, Employment & Labour Relations,

Dinesh Gunawardena and factory owners unions, The Employers’ Federation of Cey-lon (EFC) and trade unions. He said the Employers Union has agreed not to termi-nate any employee subjected to EPF/ETF deductions/contributions by employers.

He also said the Employers’ Union had agreed to pay 50% of the basic monthly salary or a minimum amount of Rs 14,500 each month until the sector resumes work.

-economynext.comCOLOMBO–The central bank has sold Rs 30 billion of Treasury bills at an auc-tion on Wednesday (13) with no visible money printing to keep down yields, data from the State debt office showed.

The debt office, which is a unit of the central bank, sold Rs. 13.8 billion of 3-month bills after offering Rs 7.0 billion at an average yield of 6.74% down from 6.84% a week a back.

Rs 5.7 billion of 6-month bills were sold after officering Rs 9.0 billion, to yield 6.83%, down from 6.90% a week earlier and Rs 10.4 billion of 12-month bills were sold at an average yield of 6.94%, down from 7.0% a week earlier. The debt of-fice sold the entire Rs 30 billion of bills

offered. Extra three-month bills were a lower volume of 12-month bills were also sold.

Sri Lanka’s private credit is expected to have slowed in April and analysts are ex-pecting private credit to growth to fall in 2020.

The central bank triggered panic in cur-rency markets by sending the rupee to 200 to the US dollar by cutting rates and in-jecting excess liquidity to money markets before credit slowed, analysts have said. The coronavirus crisis led to an abrupt halt in economic activity and people were reduced to subsistence level existence that was seen in the 1970s in Sri Lanka.

-economynext.com

LONDON - World equities sank yesterday (14) as mounting US unemployment added to worries about a slow economic recovery from coronavirus shutdowns and a second wave of the deadly disease.

Sentiment was already moribund when data was released showing new US claims for unemployment benefit slowed to 2.98 million last week.

Markets had slumped yesterday af-ter Federal Reserve Chief Jerome Powell warned of "lasting damage" to the econo-my from coronavirus shutdowns.

In Asian stock markets trading yester-day, Tokyo ended down 1.7%, Hong Kong shed 1.5% and Shanghai lost 1.0% -- one day after Wall Street slid for a second successive session as a sustained rally for global equities ran out of steam.

The negativity spilled over into Europe and in afternoon trading, London had lost 3.3% while Frankfurt and Paris dropped 2.6%.

"Sharp losses for US indices yesterday set the stage for Europe's weakness... as investors take heed from Powell's com-ments last night about the recession and its potential severity," said IG analyst Chris Beauchamp.

"If the chairman of the Federal Reserve is worried then it is time to sit up and take notice." Powell warned of a "highly uncer-tain" outlook for the world's top economy, adding that lawmakers might have to pro-vide even more stimulus to the $3 trillion already stumped up.

"The coronavirus has left a devastating human and economic toll in its wake," he said, warning that a deep, long recession "can leave behind lasting damage to the productive capacity of the economy".

Sentiment was also hit after the World Health Organization (WHO) warned the virus "may never go away." Wall Street opened yesterday to fresh losses, with the

Dow sliding 0.9%. Briefing.com analyst Patrick J. O'Hare said the nearly 3 million new unemployed added to concerns about a slow recovery.

"The key takeaway from the report is that the alarmingly high level of initial and continuing claims paints a risk of a slower recovery due to weaker consumer spend-ing activity and the rising potential that temporary job losses become permanent job losses in an elongated recovery pro-cess," he said.

Signs of an easing in the outbreak glob-ally had led to hopes for a slow return to normality but fresh infections in South Ko-rea, China, Germany and other countries as they eased lockdowns have thrown a spanner in the works.

They came as US President Donald Trump's top virus expert Anthony Fauci warned against re-opening too quickly, saying it could cause a second wave of in-fections and hurt any economic recovery.

China-US relations were strained further Wednesday after two US security agencies said hackers were trying to steal research and intellectual property related to poten-tially lucrative COVID-19 treatments and vaccines. They did not, however, provide evidence to back up the claims.

The allegation comes as the relationship between the two countries grows increas-ingly tense after a series of rows linked to Trump's accusations over Beijing's han-dling of the outbreak, and threats to hit China with fresh tariffs that have renewed trade war fears.

Meanwhile, oil prices surged as the In-ternational Energy Agency said the easing of lockdowns and output cuts had helped the oil market after "Black April," when US prices collapsed into negative territory on evaporating demand and a vast supply glut.

-Agence France-Presse

COLOMBO– Sri Lanka’s bond yields were flat yesterday (14) on moderate trading, dealers said.

Liquidity in the overnight money market was Rs 126.36 billion rupees down from Rs 136.87 billion rupees on Wednesday (13). Banks deposited Rs 136.50 billion in central bank’s excess liquidity window.

In the secondary government securities market, bond yields were flat in moder-ate trading with liquidity centred on the 15.01.2023 bond, dealers said.

A bond maturing on 10.08.2021 closed at 6.95/7.05% yesterday down from 7.00/7.10 on Wednesday, while a 2-year bond matur-ing on 01.10.2022 closed flat at 7.75/85 and a bond maturing on 15.01.2023 closed at 8.03/07% up from 8.02/07%. A bond ma-turing on 15.09.2024 closed at 8.50/58% yesterday unchanged from its last close, while a bond maturing on 15.10.2027 closed at 8.83/90% , gaining from 8.80/85% on Wednesday.

-economynext.com

Migrant workers wait to board buses to reach their hometowns after the government eased a nationwide lockdown as a preventive measure against the COVID-19 coronavirus, in Allahabad yesterday (14). Narendra Modi's grand announcement of a $265-billion rescue package for India is little comfort to the millions left destitute and desperate 50 days into a crippling coronavirus lockdown

- SANJAY KANOJIA / AFP

Mitra Innovation announces partnership with Creatio

Express Newspapers (Cey) Pvt. Ltd.,185, Grandpass Road, Colombo 14, Sri LankaTelephone: 0117 322 705 (Editorial) 0117 322 731 (Advertising)0117 322 789 (Circulation)Email – editor.dailyexpress@encl.lk/weekendexpress@encl.lk Epaper - http://epaper.newsexpress.lkFacebook –News Express Sri Lanka

3 WEEKEND EXPRESS

GLOCALGLOCAL

In Brief

As COVID-19 patients rise to 925

In a ‘historic first’

Disposal of COVID-19 bodies

MAY 15 - 17, 2020

COLOMBO - Leader of Sri Lanka’s All Ceylon Makkal Congress (ACMC-and for-mer MP) Rishad Bathiudeen joined by several former MPs filed a Fundamental Rights Petition in the Supreme Court yes-terday (14), challenging the government decree making cremation mandatory for the disposal of COVID-19 bodies, saying it goes against the Islamic faith. He has cited the country’s top health officials as respondents.

In his petition SCFR107/2020, Bathiu-deen has cited the Minister of Health, Nu-trition and Indigenous Medicine, Director General of Health Services of the Ministry of Health and Indigenous Medical Ser-vices, Secretary of the Ministry of Health and Indigenous Medical Services, and the Attorney General as respondents. Former MPs Seyed Ameer Ali, Abdullah Mohamed Mahroof, and Hussein Ahamed Bhaila, are the co-petitioners.

“The petitioners are making the applica-tion both in their own personal interest as well as in the public interest” Bathiudeen had said in his filing, adding that in light of the fact that there is no danger in carry-ing out burial, which is practiced by many countries of the world where COVID-19 death rates are very high, there is no rea-son to forego such religious practice of burial in Sri Lanka.

Bathiudeen had noted that since March 23, there have been occasions when the re-mains of a person who died in the context of the virus has been disposed of by the Government of Sri Lanka in exclusion of the right of the deceased or his or her rela-tives right to choose a mode of disposal of the cadaver in the context of the virus, and that up to the date of the petition, there had been nine deaths reported from COVID-19. He had also noted that there has been some uncertainty as to whether the 9th person had in fact died of COVID-19.

He has said the dignity of the dead, their cultural and religious traditions and their families should be respected and protected and according to WHO guidelines, person who has died of the COVID-19 virus could either be buried or cremated.

He has also stated Ministry of Health Guidelines dealing with ‘Autopsy practice and disposal of a dead body,’ up until its third version published on March 27, pro-vided for both burial and cremation and listed the steps prescribed and the time frame for disposal, but goes on to note that on March 31, immediately after the second COVID-19 death, identified as a person of the Islamic faith, the Ministry of Health without any notice had amended the Guidelines, with the fourth version specify-ing cremation exclusively within 24 hours (preferably within 12 hours).

He has stated the Gazette Extraordinary 2170/8 dated April 11 purporting to create regulations pursuant to Section 2 and 3 of the Quarantine and Prevention of Diseases Ordinance for the disposal of a dead body in the context of the virus, is ultra vires the powers granted to the 1st Respondent un-der Section 3(1)(i) of the Ordinance only allows the 1st Respondent to prescribe the mode of burial or cremation in the context of the virus but does not allow him to pre-scribe cremation in preference to burial or vice versa. He also states the regulations are contrary to the provisions of written law including the provisions relating to sudden deaths and inquests in the Code of Criminal Procedure Act No 15 of 1979 (as amended) and that there is no scientific evidence to support a conclusion that cre-mation is safer than burial to prevent the infection from virus.

He has also noted that in view of the imminent infringement of rights of many of the Islamic community, he had on or around May 5, written to the president informing him of the importance of con-ducting one’s funeral rites while respect-ing their religious beliefs, requesting that the method of disposal of a dead body be amended to include burial as well. Fil-ing his application in terms of Articles 17 and 126 of the Constitution of Sri Lanka, Bathiudeen has said he is entitled in law to seek an Order quashing Regulation 61A in Gazette Extraordinary No. 2170/8 of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lan-ka, published on April 4.

-ENCL

Rishad Bathiudeen petitions Supreme Court

COLOMBO - The government yes-terday (14) declared an island-wide, all-day curfew for Sunday (17), even as the coronavirus toll rose to 925, with 10 new confirmations announced late in the day.

The Presidential Secretariat an-nouncing the all-day countrywide cur-few did not give reasons for the all-day curfews, which will be effective from 8:00 p.m. Saturday (16) till 5:00 a.m. Monday (18). The 8:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m curfew will continue daily until May 23, it added.

The Presidential Secretariat said the curfew in force in the Districts of Co-lombo and Gampaha will continue un-til further notice.

It also noted the mechanism which commenced on Monday (11) to re-commence civilian life and economic activities while curfew is in force will continue till Saturday (16) and resume from Monday (18) onwards. It said conditions regarding the resumption of normal life will remain unchanged.

Meanwhile, the total number of COVID-19 patients in Sri Lanka rose to

925 with the addition of 26 patients on Wednesday (13) and 10 yesterday, nine of them late in the evening.

The Ministry of Health described the single COVID-19 confirmation early in the day, as a close associate of a mem-ber of the navy who had contracted the virus. The ministry also said all confir-mations on Wednesday, were from the Welisara navy base. No details were available about the nine confirmations later in the day.

More than half of the COVID-19 pos-itive individuals in Sri Lanka are from

the navy or are their close associates, Health Authorities said.

Director-General of Health Services Dr Anil Jasinghe said at present 471 COVID-19 patients are receiving treat-ment at government hospitals across the country while 445 have fully re-covered and been discharged from hospitals. Jasinghe also added that the Health Department had conducted 889 PCR tests on Wednesday (14) of which 26 had been positive for COV-ID-19.

-ENCL

Govt. declares all day countrywide curfew for Sunday

Mangala grilled by CID

President donates three months’ salary to COVID–19 fund

New envoys make virtual presentation of credentials to president

Navy vows not to let COVID-19 ‘escape’ Welisara camp

PUCSL streamlines electricity bills, gives grace period to consumers

In solidarity with Palestinians

COLOMBO - President Gotabaya Rajapaksa yesterday (14) donated the equivalent of his salary for three months to the COVID-19 Health Care and Social Security Fund.

The President’s Media Division (PMD) said Rajapaksa handed over a cheque for Rs 292,500/- amounting to three months of his salary, to Secretary to the President, P.B. Jayasundera, the Presidential Secretariat yesterday.

President Rajapaksa set up the ‘COVID-19 Healthcare and Social Secu-rity Fund’ in March, to strengthen the mitigation activities aimed at control-

ling the spread of virus outbreak in the country and related social welfare pro-grams.

The move to donate his salary comes in the wake of a request made to State sector employees to donate their May salary to the fund.

The president’s office said on Wednesday (13), COVID –19 Health-care and Social Security Fund‘s balance had surpassed Rs. 900 million.

Several people, including private and government organizations have made donations to the fund.

-ENCL

COLOMBO – Former finance minister Mangala Samaraweera was questioned by the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), for over five hours yesterday (14) over allegations of misuse of state property during the presidential election in Novem-ber 2019.

Samaraweera, who arrived at the CID premises in Colombo at around 2:00 p.m. is reported to have departed five hours later. He was summoned to the CID office yester-

day to record a statement over allegation that he as finance minister facilitated the use of Sri Lanka Transport Board buses to convey 12,500 internally displaced people in the Puttalam District to polling booths in the Northern Province to cast their votes during the presidential election.

Former minister Rishad Baduideen was questioned by the CID over the same inves-tigation several weeks ago.

-ENCL

COLOMBO - Ambassadors from the Federative Republic of Brazil, Islamic Republic of Iran and the High Commis-sioner of the Republic of India, based in Colombo presented their credentials to President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, via video conferencing yesterday (14).

The president’s office in a statement, described the presentation, at the Presi-dential Secretariat as a “historic mo-ment,” as it was the first time in Sri Lanka the ceremony had been conducted using internet technologies. It said President Rajapaksa, had instructed the presenta-tion ceremony proceed as scheduled, us-ing the available technology, rather than postpone it until the COVID-19 crisis ends.

The statement said the ceremony was relatively short with the diplomats pre-senting their credentials to the president by displaying it to the camera, after which the president had welcomed them.

The envoys making the virtual pres-entation were Sergio Luiz Canaes of the Federative Republic of Brazil, Hashem Ashjazadeh of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Gopal Baglay the Republic of India.

The Indian High Commission in a statement issued yesterday said the High Commissioner had thanked the president for arranging the traditional ceremony in an innovative manner, stating that the use of technology to overcome chal-lenges, such as those posed by the global COVID-19 pandemic, has been stressed by the leadership of India as well as Sri Lanka. He had also pointed out that yes-terday’s novel initiative underscores the significance the two countries attach to their friendly and multi-faceted ties, and also highlights India’s continued com-mitment to closely work with Sri Lanka in facing common challenges.

-ENCL

COLOMBO– The Sri Lanka Navy has vowed it will not allow the novel coro-navirus infection that has caused a lock-down of its massive Welisara camp to “escape outside our facility.”

Navy spokesman Lt. Commander Isu-ruSooriyabandara made the pledge as more navy personnel were diagnosed with the virus bringing the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Sri Lanka to 925. As on Wednesday (13), the total number of tri-forces personnel infected with the virus was 485 with 474 from the navy, 10 from the army and one from the air force.

The navy cluster reported first on April 22, has yielded more than half of the total confirmed COVID-19 cases in the country. The navy, helped by personnel from the Health Department is conduct-ing PCR tests on all those living in the camp at Welisara, Sooriyabandara said, adding, “We have up to now conducted nearly 3,000 PCR tests on people living in the camp.”

He said the samples are collected from the personnel by Health technicians and sent to government-run laboratories such as the Medical Research Institute or

the facilities at Katukurunda for testing.“Sometimes even if the test comes back

negative we test the person again to con-firm,” he said, adding that was the logic of the PCR test.

Sooriyabandara said that 126 infected personnel have recovered fully and will be released after a 14-day quarantine pe-riod. Welisara has several hundred mar-ried quarters where Navy personnel live with their families. Most of the Sailors live in barracks and the complex has its own hospital.

The complex houses around 4,200 per-sonnel and their families. Sooriyabandara said the camp maintains its own quaran-tine centre and there are some people iso-lated there. Others including some family members and close associates of infected navy personnel are in centres which are also run by the navy.

“We are looking after them very well,” he added. Sooriyabandara also denied that the operational capabilities of the navy has been affected by the COVID -19 epidemic, particularly because it has ap-peared to ravage, noting that “This is only confined to the Welisara camp.”

-economynext.com

COLOMBO- The Public Utilities Com-mission of Sri Lanka (PUCSL) together with the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) and Lanka Electricity Company Private Limited (LECO) has taken steps to ensure fairness for electricity consumers in issu-ing monthly electricity bills and allowing a grace period to pay the monthly bills.

PUCSL in a statement issued yesterday (14) said guidelines have been drawn up to calculate the electricity bills according to the number of units (pro-rata basis) re-ceived at concessionary rates, despite the delay in issuance of bills and to provide a sufficient time period to settle the bills, taking into consideration proposals made by CEB and LECO as well as complaints by the electricity consumers. PUCSL said the guidelines will be followed by the CEB and LECO when preparing the

bills. It said both CEB and LECO have been continuously providing electricity to consumers during the quarantine period even though the bills were not issued and paid accordingly. The financial condition of the institutions, it said needs to be re-stored in order to provide uninterrupted quality electricity supply in the future.

PUCSL recommendations implement-ed in preparing bills that come under quarantine curfew period includes, all bills issued after the quarantine curfew period be issued on a monthly basis as separate bills for each month; grace pe-riod given to consumer to settle the sepa-rate bills to be published by CEB and LECO with no disconnection until the relevant grace period and conditions are announced.

-ENCL

The Sri Lanka Committee for Solidar-ity with Palestinian People yesterday (14) expressed its continued support for the Palestinian struggle to regain free-dom and dignity and to return to their homes.

In a statement issued to mark An Na-kba Day, observed today (15), said the day that marked the forceful eviction of Palestinian people from their homes and land 72 years ago had been com-memorated since May 15, 1948 as a day of international solidarity with Palestin-ians.The statement:

Palestinians worldwide observe May 15 as ‘An NAQBA’, meaning ‘catastro-phe,’ to mark their forceful eviction 72 years ago from their homes and lands by

the Zionist Jewish terror gangs who ar-rived from Europe and Russia to set up a Jewish racist state on Palestinian lands.

In the aftermath of World War 1, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East was brought under British and French colonial powers. Palestine, where Palestinians were 96% and 4% Jews, were brought under British Man-datory power.

British colonial power and the Zion-ists conspired to kick out the Palestini-ans from their lands and set up an exclu-sive Jewish state of Israel there. Jewish terror gangs Irgun and Haganah, with the connivance of British rulers, began massacring and terrorizing the Palestin-ians to force them to flee their lands.

Two of the early massacres took place

in the Palestinian villages of Deir Yassin and KafrKassim.

Unable to face Zionist terror, around 700,000 Palestinians left their lands and homes for safety to neighbouring Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria and to West Bank and Gaza.

To Palestinians, the Nakba is a collec-tive tragedy whose wounds have yet to heal 72 years later today. It is not just the destruction of at least 436 villages or the forced displacement of Palestinians, but of ethnic cleansing.

The an-Nakba was commemorated since May 15, 1948 as a day of interna-tional solidarity with Palestinians.

Israeli’s Jewish-only colonization continues unabated in occupied West Bank where these settlements are to be

annexed in the same way Israel annexed occupied Golan Heights and Jerusalem with the support of United States where governments are made and unmade by Zionists lobbies. In a move to reward aggression and crime, the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was in Israel on Wednesday (13) to mark Israeli annexa-tion of occupied West Bank.

Israel today remains the symbol of evil, crime, injustice and barbarity, threatening peace in the Middle East and the world.

To mark An Naqba, the Sri Lanka Committee for Solidarity with Palestin-ian People takes this opportunity to ex-press its continued support for the Pal-estinian struggle to regain freedom and dignity and to return to their homes.

Former Minister Mangala Samaraweera talks to reports as he arrives at the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) to give a statement over a case of transporting voters during the presidential election.

– J. Sujeewakumar/ENCL

Think out of the boxPresident Gotabaya Rajapaksa has

urged the banking sector to deviate from conventional thinking and prac-tice to support the efforts to rebuild the economy which was badly hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. He has the biggest challenge Sri Lanka faces right now is to rebuild the collapsed econo-my.Hearing election petitions

The Supreme Court has appointed a five-judge bench, led by the Chief Jus-tice to hear the number of Fundamen-tal Rights petitions filed challenging the dissolution of Parliament and the fixing of the general election for June 20.

Opening air-sea bordersSri Lanka is considering reopening

its air and sea borders in July to for-eign tourists, TTG Asia reported. How-ever, Sri Lanka Tourism’s chairperson Kimarli Fernando said arrivals would be mostly Sri Lankans who reside overseas, return to visit relatives and friends.Kawasaki-like disease

The Health Ministry has said Sri Lanka is closely monitoring increas-ing cases of a Kawasaki-like disease spreading among children in Europe and in the West and that although no cases had been reported here, they would continue to study the pattern of the disease.

MAY 15 - 17, 2020 WEEKEND EXPRESS

As India begins to ease lockdown

By David M. Halbfinger and Lara Jakes

HOT TOPICSHOT TOPICS

Mumbai coronavirus cases spike

THE HAGUE/GENEVA - The Eu-ropean Union's medicines agency sug-gested yesterday (14) that a vaccine for the coronavirus could be ready inayear, even as the World Health Organization (WHO) warned the disease may never go away.

World leaders past and present have insisted that any eventual vaccines and treatments should be made available to everyone free of charge, with the glob-al death toll from the disease nearing 300,000.

The pandemic has caused massive so-cial and economic upheaval across the planet and while some nations have be-gun easing punishing lockdowns, fears of a second wave have kept many busi-nesses shuttered and people confined to their homes.

Washington ratcheted up tensions over the crisis by accusing China of try-ing to steal research, and US President Donald Trump upped the rhetoric with a colourful phrase that was likely to infuri-ate Beijing.

"We just made a great Trade Deal, the ink was barely dry, and the World was hit by the Plague from China. 100 Trade Deals wouldn't make up the difference -- and all those innocent lives lost!" Trump tweeted.

With the race to find a vaccine gath-ering pace, the European Medicines Agency said one could possibly be ready in a year based on data from trials under way.

Announcing the forecast at a video news conference, Marco Cavaleri, the EMA's head of biological health threats and vaccines strategy, stressed that it was a "best-case scenario."

"We know also that there may be de-lays," he said, voicing scepticism over reports a vaccine could be ready as early as September.

And world leaders were among 140 signatories to a letter published yester-day saying any vaccine should not be

patented and that the science should be shared among nations.

"Governments and international part-ners must unite around a global guaran-tee which ensures that, when a safe and effective vaccine is developed, it is pro-duced rapidly at scale and made avail-able for all people, in all countries, free of charge," it said.

A vaccine could allow countries to fully reopen from shutdowns that have battered economies and thrown millions of people out of work.

But the WHO cautioned Wednesday (13) that the virus may never be wiped out entirely. "This virus may become just another endemic virus in our communi-ties and this virus may never go away," said Michael Ryan, the global health body's emergencies director.

"HIV has not gone away - but we have come to terms with the virus."

The UN also warned that the outbreak risked a major mental health crisis and called for urgent action to address psy-chological suffering.

The prospect of the disease hanging around leaves governments facing a delicate balancing act between suppress-ing the pathogen and getting economies up and running. And with more gloomy forecasts emerging from the US, Trump has increasingly looked to pin the blame on China, where the virus first emerged in December.

US security agencies accused Chinese hackers of attempting to steal intellec-tual property related to treatments.

"China's efforts to target these sectors pose a significant threat to our nation's response to COVID-19," the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Secu-rity Agency (CISA) said, without giving evidence to support the allegations.

Beijing reacted with fury to the "smearing" and claimed China was lead-ing the world in COVID-19 vaccine re-search and treatment so had no need to conduct cyber espionage.

Trump has been pushing for a swift re-sumption of economic activity in the US, often against the advice of health offi-cials, as he tries to jumpstart the world's largest economy before a November election.

The United States is the country hard-est-hit by COVID-19, logging a total of more than 84,000 deaths.

Further signs of the damage to busi-nesses emerged yesterday when Lloyd's of London forecast the pandemic will cost the global insurance industry about $203 billion.

And Australia released figures show-ing almost 600,000 people lost their jobs as the country's virus shutdown took hold in April, the steepest monthly drop in employment since records began more than 40 years ago.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison called the number "terribly shocking."

But the reopening of economies con-tinued in earnest across Europe, where the EU has set out proposals for a phased restart of travel and the eventual lifting of border controls.

However, in Latin America the virus continued to surge, with a 60% leap in cases in the Chilean capital of Santiago, prompting authorities to impose a total lockdown on the city.

"It should have come a month before, about 20 days before, because there are many infected people," said Juana Ver-gara, a retiree.

In Argentina, officials were watching Buenos Aires warily after one of its poor-est and most densely populated neigh-bourhoods showed a spike in infections.

But there were also bright spots. Mau-ritius declared temporary victory against the virus, saying it had "zero" patients and had not documented a single new case in 17 days. "We have won the battle thanks to the cooperation of the public," said Health minister KaileshJagutpal. "But we have not yet won the war."

- Agence France-Presse

By Danny Kemp and Robin Millard

EU offers vaccine hope as WHO warns virus here to stay

A green light turns yellow

JERUSALEM — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s eight-hour visit to Jerusalem on Wednesday (13) for a lightning round of meet-ings with Israeli leaders raised one question that no one involved got around to answering: What was so urgent and sensitive, in the middle of a virus pandemic, that the US’ top diplomat had to make a 16-hour trip to Israel instead of simply picking up the phone?

A key, officials and experts said, was in the timing. It came on the eve of Israel’s seating its new government, one that appears divided over the immediacy of annexing about 30% of the oc-cupied West Bank, which the Palestinians have counted on for a future state. And it came as the Trump administration is facing growing pres-sure from Arab leaders across the Middle East to pump the brakes on Israel’s annexation plans.

Although Pompeo took pains to avoid publicly addressing annexation, analysts suggested that a goal of the trip was to caution Israel’s leader-ship against moving too quickly.

Pompeo met first with Prime Minister Ben-jamin Netanyahu, who had campaigned on a promise to push ahead with annexation as soon as possible, and later with Benny Gantz, alter-nate prime minister in the new government, who had campaigned against unilateral annexation.

Without explicitly suggesting that Netanyahu and Gantz slow the process, Pompeo seemed to signal as much, telling Israel Hayom, a pro-Ne-tanyahu newspaper, that Netanyahu and Gantz “will have to find the way forward together.”

Gantz, a former army chief who ran against Netanyahu, agreed last month to join a unity government with him to battle the coronavirus epidemic. But their power-sharing agreement did not give Gantz a veto over annexation as his supporters had hoped. Instead, it requires only that Gantz be consulted.

“To the extent that in the coalition agreement, Gantz waived his veto right over annexation, Pompeo is handing it back to him,” said Ofer-Zalzberg, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group. “Pompeo is giving him leverage over it, influence over it.”

If the United States, with President Don-ald Trump’s peace proposal, gave Netanyahu a green light on annexation, it may have now changed to yellow.

Dennis Ross, who helped negotiate peace plans during the Clinton administration, noted signs of “a certain pause” in the Trump admin-istration’s approach after a series of diplomatic manoeuvres that appeared designed to pressure Palestinian officials into new talks with Israel.

Notably, Ross said, leaders of neighbouring Arab states are urging the Trump administra-tion to withhold its approval of West Bank an-nexation — arguing that it would upend regional security agreements, create a new influx of Pal-estinians into Jordan and, in the end, scuttle any hope for future negotiations.

“A number of them are weighing in and say-ing, ‘Don’t do this — or at least, certainly don’t rush to do this,’” said Ross, who said he has been talking with Arab and Israeli officials.

Pompeo himself seemed to allude to the pos-sibility that immediate annexation could derail the Trump administration’s ‘vision for peace’, its blueprint for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Asked about annexation, he told Israel Hay-om, “We spoke of ways to advance the peace plan, Trump’s peace plan.

“We did not discuss only the matter of annexa-tion,” he continued, “but how to act with various relevant stakeholders and how one can ensure the move is done in an adequate manner so as to bring a result in line with the vision for peace.”

Netanyahu, who did not mention the peace plan in his appearance with Pompeo, had re-served the right in the coalition agreement to take up annexation after July 1.

In Washington, Trump administration offi-cials downplayed the significance of that date, noting that annexation could well be delayed. A senior State Department official told reporters travelling with Pompeo that “it’s going to take a while” for the Israeli government “to come to-gether with what they’re going to do” on the ad-ministration’s peace plan.

The State Department official also said that Israel was well aware of the concerns that an-nexation had raised with neighbouring Arab states and was dealing with them in a “savvy” way. The official briefed reporters on condition of anonymity due to department protocols.

Should Gantz and Gabi Ashkenazi, who is to become foreign minister and is also a former army chief, speak out forcefully against annexa-tion on security grounds, that could pose a polit-ical problem for the Trump administration, ana-lysts said. The administration could be seen as taking sides with Israel’s extreme right in ways that the former military men, whose views are considered more mainstream, could argue jeop-ardize Israel’s safety.

But Ross said the Trump administration could claim a modicum of success — and appease evangelicals and right-wing Jewish voters in the United States whose support for Trump is cru-cial in November — if its long-running pressure campaign against the Palestinians pays off.

In that scenario, Ross said, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, would re-join the negotiations with a counterproposal to the annexation map.

Opponents of annexation have generally taken a much dimmer view, warning that it would kill any chance of a two-state solution to the long-running conflict and set off violence that could quickly lead to the collapse of the Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank under the Oslo accords.

There have already been signs this week of an uptick in violence: On Tuesday (12), an Israeli soldier was killed when a heavy rock thrown from a house near the northern West Bank city of Jenin struck him in the head.

Then, even as the hunt for his killer or killers continued, a Palestinian teenager, Zaid Qaisiyya, was shot in the head and killed early Wednesday in clashes with Israeli security forces in the Fa-war refugee camp near the southern West Bank city of Hebron. The boy’s funeral drew a crowd of thousands.

-New York Times

A scientist prepares a sample at the Szentgothai Research Centre of Pecs University, in Pecs, Hungary, yesterday (14) during their diagnostic activity to locate the nature of the virus strain and the connection to novel coronavirus COVID-19

- KAROLY ARVAI / POOL / AFP

4

What Pompeo’s visit to Israel signalled on annexation

MUMBAI - As Indians await details of a huge corona-virus relief package Prime Minister Narendra Modi has announced to jump start the economy, the outbreak in the financial capital of Mumbai and elsewhere in Ma-harashtra state is starting to overwhelm hospitals and slums, complicating any economic recovery plan.

About a third of India's 71,865 confirmed virus cases, and nearly 40% of its 2,415 deaths, have been reported in Maharashtra, the coastal state in the cen-tre of the country that is home to Bollywood, a huge agriculture industry and India's largest stock market.

The Sensex has sunk about 25% from its year-to-date high in January.

Health experts have praised Modi's government for enforcing a stringent weeks-long lockdown that has helped the nation of 1.3 billion so far avoid the kind of catastrophic rates of illness and death that have beset the United States, Britain and elsewhere.

But as India's lockdown restrictions are eased, whether the country can steer its economy back on track will largely depend on how Maharashtra re-bounds, experts say.

"It's a huge impact," Gurcharan Das, the former head of Procter & Gamble in India, said of the state. "I think the default position should be to open, and you only lock down by exception, because eventually I fear that the cost of the lockdown will be far greater in lives even than the disease."

India's lockdown, imposed on March 25, is set to at least partially end on May 18. Some restrictions on manufacturing, agriculture and self-employment were lifted on May 4 to ease the burden on the poor and informal sector workers who comprise the majority of India's workforce.

Indian Railways also partially reopened to run spe-cial trains carrying migrant workers stranded in the lockdown who fled India's big cities, including Mum-bai, for their village homes.

At least some of the passengers carried the corona-virus with them, infection spikes in the states of Bihar and Orisha corresponding with their arrival show.

In an address on Tuesday (12) night, Modi said the government would spend more than $260bn to revive the economy. The government described some details of the package, including income tax cuts, liquidity injections for cash-strapped companies and govern-ment-backed bank loans.

It also said it would bar foreign companies from competing in bidding for government contracts of up to $26m, in a nod to the self-reliance and protectionist policies outlined in Modi's address. Ritu Dewan, vice president of the New Delhi-based Indian Society of La-bor Economics, said the government should do more to address the needs of India's poor.

"People are out of money, what about them? Where will they go? People need cash at this moment," she said. Places like Maharashtra are showing signs of distress. The state government has ordered all pri-vate hospital doctors to spend at least 15 days treating COVID-19 patients at public hospitals, where infection rates among healthcare workers are growing.

The government also released half of its inmate pop-ulation amid outbreaks in prisons.

And health officials are struggling to contain the spread of the virus in Mumbai, one of the world's most densely populated cities.

Anushaa Vijay, 31, an architect in Mumbai, said the pandemic has had a transformative effect.

"The virus has bought the liveliest city I know of to a standstill," she said.

But the narrow lanes of Dharavi, one of Asia's big-gest slums, are still crowded. Prashant Pawar's neigh-bour, MukundPatil, a 58-year-old diabetic street food vendor, developed a mild fever earlier this month. Two days later, he tested positive for the virus. Pawar tested negative.

Pawar accompanied Patil in the ambulance to LokmanyaTilak Municipal General Hospital. By the time doctors could attend to him, Patil was dead.

The scenes inside the hospital left Pawar distressed."Its indoors were full of people. Very few people

were wearing masks," Pawar said, adding that "at times I saw more than one patient being rested on a single bed".

The hospital, where many of the hundreds of COV-ID-19 patients from Dharavi have been treated, has been under scrutiny since a video emerged showing four bodies shrouded in black plastic lying next to vi-rus patients.

A member of the hospital staff, Dr AvinashSaknure, said health facilities were "overstretched.” "We are do-ing our best with what we have," he said.

-Agencies

Pet cats are killing 300 million native animals per year in Australia

New Zealand leaps out of coronavirus lockdown

Paul Manafort, Trump’s ex-campaign manager, released to home confinement

By Subel Bhandari

By Eileen Sullivan

Coronavirus freedom

Cuddly but deadly

Bungee jumps, midnight haircuts

WASHINGTON - Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, was released from prison Wednesday (13) and granted confinement in his home in Northern Virginia because of the coronavirus pan-demic, one of his lawyers, Todd Blanche, said.

Manafort had been in a minimum-security prison in Lo-retto, Pennsylvania, serving a sentence of 7 1/2 years for fi-nancial and lobbying violations related to his work for a cor-rupt Ukrainian politician.

Prisons and jails across the country have been hot spots for the spread of the virus, though there were no recorded cases among inmates or staff at the Loretto facility where Manafort was held.

Attorney General William Barr ordered the Bureau of Prisons in April to determine which federal inmates could be safely released to home confinement. He directed the bureau to “give priority in implementing these new standards to the most vulnerable inmates and the most affected facilities.”

In mid-April, Manafort’s lawyers asked the Bureau of Pris-ons to release their client to home confinement. The lawyers said he was at high risk of contracting the virus because of his age, 71, and pre-existing health conditions, including being hospitalized in February after contracting the flu and bronchitis.

The charges against Manafort stemmed from the investi-gation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, into possible ties between Russia and the Trump campaign, but the cases did not involve his five months of political work for Trump.

Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, had also been told last month that he would be released to home con-finement because of virus concerns. He had been expected to be home by May 1. He remains in quarantine in a medium-security prison in Otisville, New York, a person familiar with his situation said.

Trump has publicly praised Manafort. After Manafort was convicted, he said his former campaign chairman “refused to ‘break’” under pressure from prosecutors, unlike Cohen.

“I feel very badly for Paul Manafort and his wonderful family,” Trump said at the time. “Such respect for a brave man!”

-New York Tim

CANBERRA - Pet cats are killing 300 million native animals per year in Australia, researchers have found.

According to the government-funded research, up to 8,000 animals are being killed per square kilometre per year, Canberra-based Threatened Species Recov-ery Hub (TSRH) said yesterday (14).

Some 2.7 million or more than 25% of Australian households have pet cats, according to government estimates. About half of them have more than one cat, making in total 3.8 million pet cats.

The new research, published in the Wildlife Re-search journal last month, assessed the impact of pet cats on Australian wildlife for the first time.

According to the study, about 1.1 million pet cats are securely contained 24 hours a day so they do not pose a threat to wildlife.

But 2.7 million, or 71% of all pet cats, are able to roam and hunt and, on average, each of them kills 110 native animals each year - 40 reptiles, 38 birds and 32 mammals. It means the felines are collectively killing 297 million native animals a year.

The impact is concentrated in cities and towns where there can be 40 to 70 roaming per cats per square kilometre, collectively killing up to 8,100 ani-mals per square kilometre per year, the study said.

The researchers said there have been many docu-mented cases of even a single roaming pet cat driving the decline of species in their area.

Pet cats are responsible for the decline of feather-tailed glider population in south-eastern New South Wales, a skink lizard population in a Perth suburb, and a population of olive legless lizards in Canberra.

The data is compiled from the findings of 66 differ-ent studies, including GPS tracking of cats, analysis of video collar footage and of cat faeces to see what they had been eating. Pet owners were also surveyed.

-dpa

SYDNEY/WELLINGTON - After seven weeks trussed up with some of the world’s toughest coronavirus curbs, New Zealanders like Jim Boult leapt at the chance to cheer the end of the country’s lockdown yesterday (14) - literally in his case, with a bungee jump.

As the mayor of South Island adventure tourism resort Queenstown, Boult’s vault off Kawarau Bridge was as much a move for TV cameras to attract visitor attention as an act of sheer exuberance. But the sense of relief at the prospect of a re-turn to some kind of normality was shared across the country.

In Auckland, residents queued from midnight at barber shops and salons for their first chance of a professional hairdo in nearly two months, according to local media reports. In Wellington, families strolled along the waterfront, while oth-ers waited at stores set to reopen with safety measures in place.

“It’s been an onslaught of people booking in so we’re flat out for the next two three weeks,” Ali Kamaruddin, a barbershop owner in northern coastal city Tauranga, told state broadcast-er TVNZ. “We’re expecting everything, long hair, home hair-cutsand big stuff.”

While dramatically reducing the spread of the disease, some of the stricter social distancing restrictions worldwide deliv-ered a big economic hit to New Zealand’s $200 billion econo-my, which is dependent on trade and tourism.

The country had fewer than 1,497 confirmed cases and fewer than 90 people are still sick. It reported extensive testing and no new cases for the third consecutive day yesterday, and only 21 people have died.

Restrictions were eased by a notch in late April, but yester-day’s further easing to ‘level 2’ in the Pacific nation’s scale of alert allows for retail, restaurants and other public spaces in-cluding playgrounds to reopen.

Traffic returned to the country’s roads and office towers filled up with employees returning after weeks of working from home. Schools only open next week but offices were al-lowed to start yesterday. New Zealanders are allowed to travel between regions, students will be able to return to school from Monday (18), while bars will reopen from May 21. Social gath-erings, including for weddings and other religions ceremonies, are to be limited to 10 people.

-Agencies

18 Afghan babies face an uncertain fate

If no longer the best seller

By Patrick Greenfield and Erin McCormick By Richard C. Paddock and Dera Menra Sijabat

By Mujib Mashal

REALITY CHECKREALITY CHECK

By Mazen Mahdi

BANGKOK — Six days a week, the butchers of Tomohon gather at Indonesia’s most no-torious market and cut up bats, rats, snakes and lizards that were taken from the wilds of Sulawesi island.

Some of the butchers also slaughter dogs — many of them pets snatched from city streets — by clubbing them to death and burning off their fur with blowtorches.

For years, animal lovers and wildlife activ-ists have urged officials to close the bazaar, boastfully known as the Tomohon Extreme Market. Now, the coronavirus pandemic is putting renewed pressure on the officials to finally take action.

“The market is like a cafeteria for animal pathogens,” said the lead expert for Indone-sia’s coronavirus task force, WikuAdisasmito, who has urged the government to close the country’s wildlife markets. “Consuming wild animals is the same as playing with fire.”

The earliest cluster of coronavirus cases in the global outbreak was linked to a market in Wuhan, China, where live animals were kept close together, creating an opportunity for the virus to jump to humans. The SARS virus, which killed 800 people worldwide, is believed to have originated in bats before spreading to civets in a wildlife market in Chi-na, and ultimately infecting people in 2002.

China ordered the closure of all its wildlife markets after the Wuhan outbreak in Decem-ber. Now Indonesia’s Tomohon market is one of the region’s largest to sell wildlife for food.

Most of the wild animals at Tomohon are slaughtered before they reach the market. It is mainly dogs that are kept alive in cages and killed on the spot for customers who say that they taste better when freshly killed.

“It is like a time bomb,” said Billy Gustafi-antoLolowang, manager of the Tasikoki Wild-life Rescue Centre in the nearby town of Bi-tung. “We can only wait until we become the epicentre of a pandemic like Wuhan.”

Local residents believe some animals have medicinal properties, including bats, which are said to cure asthma. In North Sulawesi, the largely Christian province that includes Tomohon, bush meat is such a big part of the local diet that snake and bat meat are often sold in supermarkets.

“Before the virus, bats were the most popu-lar, followed by rats and pythons,” said Roy Nangka, 40, who has worked as a butcher in Tomohon since 1999. “Now people mostly buy the meat of pigs and boars.”

Indonesia, which has the world’s fourth-largest population, was slow to acknowledge the threat of the coronavirus pandemic and lags far behind other nations in testing. It be-latedly imposed travel and social distancing restrictions, and the virus has spread to every province.

As of Wednesday (13), Indonesia had re-corded 15,438 cases and 1,028 deaths, the second-highest number of fatalities in East Asia after China. Some officials say many more cases and deaths have gone undetected and unreported.

On Tuesday (12), a coalition of animal rights groups called Dog Meat Free Indonesia urged the nation’s president, Joko Widodo, to close wildlife markets to prevent the possible emer-gence of a new pathogen.

“It is shocking to see markets selling wildlife and domesticated animals in full operation,” the group said in a letter to Joko. “If we do not act, the question is not whether another simi-lar pandemic will emerge, but when.”

Any decision to shutter Indonesia’s wildlife markets is the responsibility of local officials, said IndraExploitasia, director of biodiversity conservation for Indonesia’s Ministry of Envi-ronment and Forestry. She said the ministry had encouraged local officials to close them.

Research shows that bats, rats and snakes “play a role as a reservoir” for diseases that can cause illness in humans, she said.

Her office identified seven large markets on the islands of Java, Sumatra, Bali and Sulawe-si that sell wildlife for consumption. Activists say many smaller markets also sell wildlife meat.

Many of the markets are best known for selling birds taken from the wild in a thriving illicit trade that strips Indonesia’s forests of an estimated 20 million songbirds a year.

At Depok Market, a popular bird and wild-life market in the city of Solo, local authorities ordered the culling of nearly 200 bats over coronavirus fears.

The bats were killed in March by drugging and burning them alive, said the Solo city secretary and COVID-19 task force leader, Ahyani, who like many Indonesians uses one name. The Depok Market remains open, but no longer sells bats. Officials in Tomohon and other localities have resisted calls to close the sections of markets selling wildlife because they provide an important source of tradition-al food and income.

The quality of a meal in the region is deter-mined by the diversity of animals being served, so local residents are keen to offer guests a va-riety of meats. Bush meat often costs as much as or more than farm-raised meat.

The Tomohon Extreme Market is part of a much larger market — the Tomohon Faithful Wilken Market, named for a German mission-ary — that sells all kinds of items, including fruits and vegetables, hardware, clothing and cell phones.

Tomohon city officials, in response to the coronavirus, cut the market’s hours by more than half in March to reduce social contact.

In the wildlife section, about 120 butchers work in the equatorial heat to carve up the various species they offer, including pythons measuring up to 20 feet long, monitor lizards, whitetail rats, wild boars and rice-field frogs.

In addition to promoting the bush meat trade, the market has also come under attack for the way some sellers procure and kill cats and dogs.

Many of the animals are kidnapped pets, activists say. A 2016 survey by the non-profit group Animal Friends Manado Indonesia found that 90% of North Sulawesi pet owners reported having a dog or cat stolen.

-New York Times

Several deaths, a hunger strike and dis-turbances on board cruise ships have raised fresh concern about what crew members say is the deteriorating mental health of staff stranded aboard cruise ships still floating at sea.

A worldwide standoff between cruise companies and health authorities has left approximately 100,000 crew stranded at sea. Many have spent more than a month self-isolating in cabins, unable to leave, and have lost their jobs during the pan-demic.

On Sunday (10), a Ukrainian woman died after apparently jumping from the Regal Princess outside the port of Rotter-dam in the Netherlands. Dutch police con-firmed the death of a 39-year-old woman. Princess Cruises, part of Carnival Corpora-tion, said support was being offered to staff and the family of the deceased.

On the Navigator of the Seas off the coast of Miami, 15 Romanian crew started a hunger strike in protest at not being able to disembark. Royal Caribbean said the strike ended after a charter flight was ar-ranged from Barbados later this month.

Many other ships remain marooned around the world. In the Philippines, Ma-nila Bay has more than 20 cruise ships with around 5,300 staff on board waiting for clearance to disembark.

In Germany, police in the Germany port of Cuxhaven were called on board the Mein Schiff 3 last week after reports of distur-bances. Nearly 3,000 crew members from several ships had been assembled on board awaiting repatriation to numerous coun-tries, but were told they would have to stay on the ship after nine people tested posi-tive for Covid-19.

The deaths and conflicts have prompted renewed warnings about the mental health of crew stuck at sea waiting for permission to return home.

Cruise lines were managing to repatri-ate small contingents of crew members to some Caribbean countries by Tuesday (12), but even those efforts raised consternation in Haiti and Grenada after reports of some crew not being put into the required quar-antines, according to reports in the Miami Herald.

Cruise companies have blamed strict rules from health authorities for not letting crew disembark. In and around US waters, 100 cruise ships with 70,000 crew are still waiting at sea, but the US Centres for Dis-ease Control and Prevention recently told the Guardian that some operators have opted to stay at sea, citing concerns about cost and potential legal consequences.

Crew members stranded at sea have said the experience has taken its toll on their mental health.

Will Lees, a Canadian who was hired to run art shows and gallery sales on the Nor-wegian Star starting last October, said the waiting and uncertainty have been deeply unsettling. He has not been on land since passengers left the ship on March 14 and has been shuffled between three ships to await repatriation. He was on the Norwe-gian Epic last Friday (8) at dock in Miami, but has since been moved to a new ship that is now sailing him to Europe. From there he has been told he will be flown back to Canada.

“Each day you have no real purpose. It’s the same as the day before,” he said in a WhatsApp message sent from the middle of the Atlantic, somewhere near the Ber-muda triangle. “You feel like you’re giving up your life and doing the same thing over and over again. It’s depressing.”

In response to concerns about the men-tal health of staff, Royal Caribbean said: “The health and safety of our crew is our top priority and we are working around the clock to make sure they get home safe-ly. We have an employee assistance pro-gramme that crew are able to call 24 hours a day and is fully confidential.”

Carnival Corporation said: “We provide all employees complimentary access to our employee assistance programme (EAP), which includes a variety of services, and credentialed counsellors. In addition, our on board medical team is trained to iden-tify guests and crew who might need ad-ditional resources and support.”

Tui said it has since been able to send 1,200 crew on the Mein Schiff 3 home on charter flights carrying only workers who have tested negative.

-The Guardian

Where bats are still on the menu

MANAMA- The tradition of musaharati - Ramadan drummers who awaken the faithful for their pre-dawn meal - may be dying out across the Muslim world, but Yasser al-Samak has become a social me-dia hit by adapting age-old songs for the time of coronavirus.

The silence of the darkened streets of Bilad al-Qadeem, a village outside the capital Manama, has been broken dur-ing the holy month by the voice of the 50-year-old and the pounding of the drummer who accompanies him.

In a distinctive Bahraini accent he sings of life in the pandemic, extols the benefits of social distancing, and gives thanks to medics and first responders for their sacrifices on the front line. "Oh quickly the time of suhoor arrives, but

this time it is different from all the years before," Samak sings of the meal which fortifies observant Muslims for their day of fasting ahead.

"Stay home with your family, and blend your suhoor meal with hope, be-cause those who rely on God, he will pro-tect them," he sings.

"Make yourself strong with prayer and wear the mask as a shield against the pandemic," go the lyrics, which mix religious blessings with standard health advice.

Samak also humorously plays on the word "corona" urging people to still eat "macarona" - macaroni - rhyming in Ara-bic to say that life must go on and that the faithful should not lose their resolve in the face of the crisis.

Devout Muslims observe the holy fast-ing month of Ramadan by abstaining from food and drink from sunrise to set.

In a centuries-old tradition, the musa-harati once provided the heartbeat to the ritual, but the practice has become rarer across the Muslim world now that people have alarms and smartphones to rouse them from their sleep.

In the village streets where Samak roams from door to door, with a lock-down in force, only a few residents are out and about buying basic necessities. Traffic is light and the stray cats mostly have the pavements to themselves.

Video clips of Samak reciting his timely messages have circulated widely on WhatsApp and Instagram. The vet-eran musaharati said he hopes to raise

awareness while also spreading hope and maintaining a sense of continuity during the crisis.

"We had poems specifically written this year about coronavirus and they have been popular. I sing them along-side traditional ones," he told AFP as he walked the streets of Bilad al-Qadeem.

"I have been doing this for 30 years, but it's not like before when we had a lot of children taking part," he said of the youngsters that used to come out and trail behind him.

"Now because of the coronavirus situa-tion we are limited to a maximum of five people," he said, as children came out of a house to listen, only to be quickly brought back in by their father.

-Agence France-Presse

Bahrain's Ramadan drummer goes viral with coronavirus message

KABUL — When the carnage was over, the dead bodies bagged and the guns put away, what was left behind spoke of the true extent of the tragedy: 18 new born babies, many covered in blood and most now motherless — casualties of war be-fore they had even left the hospital.

Even for a country steeped in violent death to the point of numbness, the as-sault on a maternity clinic in Kabul on Tuesday (12) was unfathomable in its cruelty.

Afghanistan is adept at the rituals of violent death. There are procedures for handling the victims, and even well-prac-ticed routines for discarding the remains of the suicide bombers who come to kill and be killed.

But what do you do with so many ba-bies, all too similar in their little shapes and raw faces, most of them now without the first people in their lives and evacu-ated from a blown-up hospital?

The oldest, born five days earlier, and the youngest, delivered in a safe room after the attack had begun, are lucky: Their mothers survived. Many of the oth-ers have barely completed a full 24 hours in this violent world, their mothers mur-dered next to them.

The heart-wrenching effort to iden-tify the babies at the maternity clinic and reunite them with their families began in the immediate hours after the attack, be-fore the Special Forces had even left the scene.

Dozens of men gathered around as a community elder emerged from a hospi-tal that was still drenched in blood with a list of mothers’ names. The babies them-selves had not yet been named.

In Afghanistan, a conservative, male-dominated society, men take offence at the mere mention of their wives’ names in public. It is extremely rare — and ar-duous — for a woman to make legal de-cisions for her child in the absence of a man. But now, for once, the men in the crowd outside the hospital listened in-tently as the babies were identified by their mothers’ names.

“The child of Suraya!” the community elder shouted. “The child of Suraya — she was healthy, I myself helped load it into the ambulance.”

“The child of Gul Makai — evacuated to the Ataturk hospital,” he shouted.

At the Ataturk hospital the next morn-ing, the two children were next to each other in incubators in the ward where all 18 babies had been transferred. But Suraya Ibrahimi was dead, already bur-ied. Gul Makai was there next to her child, limping with a leg wound.

This was Suraya Ibrahimi’s fifth child. The 31-year-old had been an army of-ficer for several years, said a relative who had found her way to the baby’s bed. Her military ID said she was a sergeant at the

headquarters of the Ministry of Defence, part of the regiment providing security and support to the headquarters.

Gul Makai, 35, is a housewife, mar-ried to a taxi driver. Her seventh child was born with breathing problems, so they had remained at the hospital for five days.

When the attack began, she said, she and the two other mothers in her room faced a dilemma: Should they try to es-cape and leave their babies behind? Or should they stay?

The women were all on their own, no family at their side. The spread of COV-ID-19 had forced the hospital to stop even husbands from accompanying their wives, Zahra Jafari, a midwife working there, said.

The other two mothers stayed, and were most likely dead, she said — she had not seen them. Gul Makai left her baby, rushed to the hallway, jumped out, and was evacuated through one of the back doors.

On the street, she didn’t know what to do. She had no phone, and she knew no phone numbers. Outside another gate, on the opposite end of the hospital, her husband, Azizullah, was standing with a change of clothes he had brought her when the attack had begun. They had no word of each other.

Gul Makai stopped a motorcycle, told the man what had happened, and plead-ed with him to take her to her home. From home, she called Azizullah to tell him she was safe.

But the baby.Azizullah stayed outside the hospital

walls along with the dozens of other fa-thers and brothers searching for news, waiting for the military operation to be over.

For several hours, Gul Maki had no news of her child. And all those hours? “I just wailed,” she said.

When the community elder reading the list outside the attacked hospital an-nounced that “the child of Gul Makai” had been taken to Ataturk hospital, Azi-zullah rushed there and called his wife to come over, so she could identify the baby.

There he was, in a little shirt with pink sleeves and yellow cartoons on its chest: the “child of Gul Makai.”

Outside the ward on Wednesday (13) morning, in the hospital yard, Azizullah — a small man with honest eyes and short beard under his mask — paced with other fathers, grandfathers, aunts and uncles. They had brought the documents needed to pick up the babies, as they were told: national IDs of the father or mother, the signature of the local community elder.

But the doctors and the officials from the health ministry were in meetings.

An hour passed, then two, then three. It started drizzling.

The family members outside — some who had just come from burying the dead mothers — grew restless, frustrated. The doctors kept saying they were waiting for the babies’ files to arrive from the ruins of the other hospital, to make sure they did not make mistakes.

It wasn’t just the running from door to door, waiting for meetings to finish, that was driving the family members mad. There was also the swarm of strangers — women, and some men — who had ar-rived at the hospital.

Some had come out of solidarity. Among them were two women, one a doctor and an employee of a develop-ment organization, who had come the night before to breastfeed the babies; one stayed late into the night. Others also kept coming and offering to help.

But then there were the dozens and dozens of other women who had arrived with another agenda: adoption. In a bi-zarre, dystopian scene, they kept going around and asking if someone would give them a baby.

Ghulam Sakhi, who had buried his daughter the night before and was here to pick up his grandchild, was ap-proached by women asking for babies so many times that he blew up and started screaming.

“Have some fear of the lord, some shame, people!” he said. “Are you human or not? It’s not like their entire families drowned in the waters of Turkey and Greece and the children have no one left. It’s not like their entire families were slaughtered that you want to take their children.”

Finally, by early afternoon after much emotion and near-fistfights, the hospital began discharging the babies, one by one. By the end of the day, the identities of 11 were confirmed and handed to their fam-ilies. The rest remained for another day.

For some, it was relatively easy once the process finally got underway. Azi-zullah pulled up his Toyota Corolla and Gul Makai limped into the back seat. A younger female relative carried the baby.

Azizullah choked up.“Not just my wife,” he said, his eyes

welling with tears as he described Gul Makai: a hero.

Others left with only raw pain.A young woman, in her 20s, wept in the

hallway outside the ward. She was there to collect her sister’s child, she said. The sister was dead, and her husband was in the army serving on the front lines of the war in Ghazni province.

No matter how much she begged, the doctors said that what she wanted was simply not possible. One hospital official blocked the door to the ward.

“Go bring a man,” he said.

-New York Times

Born into carnage

Nurses with newborns at Ataturk hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday (13). These newborns were rescued during an attack on a maternity clinic in Kabul a day earlier

- Jim Huylebroek/The New York Times

WEEKEND EXPRESS MAY 15 - 17, 2020 5

The state of our oceansDeaths and hunger strikes point to mental health crisis on stranded cruise ships

COMMENTARYCOMMENTARY

- ISHARA S. KODIKARA / AFP

A Muslim religious scholar prays at the Jummah Masjid Mosque during the Islamic Holy month of Ramadan in Colombo on May 4

From Aluthgama to post-Easter Sunday to COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant shut-down of social and community life has meant that the political debate and dialogue in Sri Lanka, has moved from more traditional forms of communi-cations, to exclusively electronic and especially social media platforms. Its effectiveness for the nation’s political dialogue has been tested during the past two months and has shown some ability to communicate ideas with political traction within society.

This is unsurprising because social media provide very effective in both the 2015 and the 2019 presidential elections. In the 2015 election, the unsuccessful Mahinda Rajapaksa campaign dominated every form of media space and cover-age except for social media, which was the only level playing field by its very nature and which was largely supportive of the ultimately success-ful Maithripala Sirisena challenge to the then Rajapaksa Administration. Similarly, in the run up to the 2019 presidential election, social media was dominated by sentiments supportive of the successful candidacy of the ultimate winner in that election. More recently though with Parlia-ment dissolved on March 2, the opposition has had to rely solely on electronic and social me-dia and to their credit, despite the obvious and natural national pre-occupation with preventing the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic within the country, socio-political issues have been raised in the electronic and social media and effectively championed.

The most obvious and dominant issue is unsur-prisingly, regarding the now dissolved Parliament, the re-summoning of which, the opposition has championed entirely via the electronic and social media. That this pressure was being felt at the highest levels, was demonstrated by the fact that the president felt obliged to do a media interview and explain his reasons for not doing so.

The prime minister followed with his own concession in that regard, by summoning all two hundred and twenty five members of the 8th Parliament of Sri Lanka for a meeting at Temple Trees, which olive leaf was only grasped by the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), its parliamentar-ians coming from all parts of the North and East for the meeting and following up the same at the PM’s request with another meeting later the same day at his residence. The other political parties, including the main opposition Samagi Jana Ba-lavegaya (SJB), the United National Party (UNP) and the JanathaVimukthiPeramuna (JVP) all boycotted the meeting.

The corollary of that issue has been the date of holding, parliamentary elections, the opposi-tion claiming with considerable merit, that a free and fair election is not currently possible under COVID-19 preventive social distancing measures. Moreover, the period of not having a functioning legislature is exceeding the maximum period of three months and is, prima facie a violation of the Constitution of Sri Lanka.

The constitutional arguments are due to be argued in the most appropriate and effective forum for the same, the Supreme Court of the Re-public, with leave to proceed granted to petition-ers, including RanjithMadumaBandara, General Secretary of the SJB led by SajithPremadasa, and former Ministers PataliChampikaRanawaka and Kumara Welgama, the latter two filing a joint petition.

Support for the petitions and oral arguments are scheduled to be made next week on May 18 and 19.

In an interesting development, in recognition of the independence of the Election Commission and its own conflict of interests, the Attorney Gen-eral (AG)has informed the Supreme Court, that the AG’s Department cannot appear for the Elec-tion Commission in the said case, resulting in the Commission having to retain private counsel. This also highlights the inherent conflict of interests which arises from the AG being simultaneously the chief law officer of the State and the chief legal advisor to the government, often interpreted and practiced by AGs, as being the chief legal advisor to the Executive.

It is pertinent to note that during the Octo-ber 2018 constitutional crisis, when Speaker KaruJayasuriya wrote to the then AG seeking his views on the legality of the president’s actions in dissolving parliament before four and a half years of its five year term had been completed, the then AG declined to advise the Speaker. Similarly, it is quite likely that in Court, the AG on behalf of the Head of Government and the Election Commis-sion may take divergent positions regarding the issues.

The rule of law argument for Sri Lanka is quite simple. We are politically a functioning if some-what challenged democratic society. Our demo-cratic norms and freedoms are important to who we are as a nation state. The fight against COV-ID-19 cannot and indeed should not be permitted to be a rationale for a weakening of our democrat-ic norms and freedoms. The most successful fights against the spread of the Coronavirus has been by democratic states and its opposite, namely au-thoritarianism, lack of transparency and limited government accountability, such as in China has actually exacerbated the crisis.

The Sri Lankan State needs all the three arms of the state, namely the Executive, the Judiciary and the Legislature functioning to ensure that we are a society governed by law or a civilized nation under the rule of law. The Executive arm of government, in any nation always finds being held account-able to a Legislature to be somewhat of an irritant but it is a staple in any civilized society, except in absolute monarchies of which there are now, only a handful in the world.

It is rather obvious that the election to the ninth Parliament of Sri Lanka, also needs to be held in a manner that does not endanger the public health. The constitutional and legal arguments in that regard would be made and heard in the apex court of Sri Lanka next week. But Sri Lanka in its fight against the spread of COVID-19 cannot and should not weaken the rule of law and / or its democratic rights and freedoms. It is unnecessary and very unwise to do so.

-This article was originally featured on groundviews.org

By Harim Peiris

“I need justice but I am scared even to ask for the medical record. My mother did not have Corona, yet au-thorities cremated her on a Ramadan day and gave me the ashes. I did not have an option other than accepting it and burying it. Our family mem-bers were dragged like criminals to be quarantined without even being told that our mother had by then passed away” said a son of the 9th victim.

To date in Sri Lanka nine persons are said to have died of COVID-19 and out of these four are Muslims. At least two of these victims’ families believe their loved ones did not die of COVID-19. If I had written this a few days ago people would have said I was being emotional. But now the health ministry personnel have confirmed that the 9th victim’s report is negative. Yet to date her name continues to be in the list of those who have died of COVID-19.

Social distancing, face masks, cur-fews for weeks, home-quarantine, de-tention, cordons and contract tracing constitute the new normal against this dangerous virus. Sri Lanka has man-aged to keep the spread at reasonably low tide in comparison to many other developing countries. While preventive measures could have begun earlier, the hard work of all those on the frontlines who have kept the virus in check so far is to be celebrated. At the same time, however, the government’s COVID-19 emergency measures, particularly in a context without a sitting Parliament or functioning judiciary, have weakened the necessary checks and balances. With an executive determined to rule through the military and ad hoc meas-ures often run by family members, civil liberties and democratic institutions are at grave risk.

Another danger in the government’s approach to the virus, however, is already putting lives and freedoms at risk. On April 11, the Minister of Health brought in an amended regu-lation making cremation compulsory for COVID-19 or suspected COVID-19 victims. A circular published on March 27, consistent with previous health reg-ulations, allowed cremation or burial within 24 hours. This changed with the Ministry of Health’s Provisional Clini-cal Practice Guidelines on COVID-19 Suspected and Confirmed Patients, dated March 31, which made crema-tion the only option. Muslim religious norms do not permit cremation, and the amended regulation has caused great distress within the community.

Until March 30, the Ministry of Health webpage listed burial as a safe option for COVID-19 victims – but the death of the first Muslim victim saw a rushed cremation that made the guide-lines disappear overnight. The victim passed away on March 30 around 7:00 p.m. at Negombo base hospital, and the cremation was completed over-night, without permitting any family member to see the body. To date no medical reports have been given to this family who have been in quarantine for 36 days in

Pannichchenkerni military camp.Thereafter, the Director-General of

Health Dr. Anil Jasinghe, who super-vises all medical doctors attached to government hospitals, acted swiftly

and subtly to change the said guide-lines to make cremation the only op-tion – just days after he himself had appeared on television and confirmed to the viewing public that burial was safe. The revised cremation-only rules were made public on April 1. The speed of the change and the overnight re-moval of the previous guideline sug-gest it was done to justify the wrong-doing on March 30, which the family and Muslim religious and community leaders had protested against strongly. The family of another victim who died on April 1 was pressured to sign a form stating they consented to the crema-tion of their loved one.

On April 1, at a meeting of many political party leaders and ex-Muslim MPs, including those from the prime minister’s own Sri Lanka Podujana-Peramuna (SLPP) party, this issue of burial was taken up but not treated with the sensitivity that it deserves. Dr.Jasinghe was present at the meet-ing but provided no scientific reason to disallow burial. Muslim leaders at the meeting requested the prime minister to appoint a committee of experts in the field to look into the burial option. Although the PM provisionally agreed to this proposal, nothing has been done so far.

On April 3 the largest body that rep-resents government doctors, the Gov-ernment Medical Officers Association (GMOA), wrote to Dr.Jasinghe asking him to consult a team of experts on the issue of burial, while drawing attention to the fact both Sri Lankan law as well as WHO guidelines permit burial. To date, there has been no expert consul-tation.

The current government’s guidance is inconsistent with that of the World Health Organization (WHO). On March 24, the WHO released guide-lines for safe handling of deceased COVID-19 bodies. As the WHO states, “It is a common myth that persons who have died of a communicable dis-ease should be cremated, but this is not true.” Because COVID-19 is a res-piratory illness of the lungs primarily transmitted through droplets (unlike Ebola or Cholera), “dead bodies are generally not infectious.”

Those preparing the dead body for final rites must wear protective equip-ment, and those who view the dead body must wash their hands. But with these precautions taken, “people who have died from COVID-19 can be bur-ied or cremated.” In creating its sci-ence-based guidelines, the WHO em-phasized that countries and healthcare systems should respect and protect the “dignity of the dead, their cultural and religious traditions, and their fami-lies.” Contrary to what happened in Negombo, the WHO also recommends avoiding hasty disposal of COVID-19 dead bodies.

On April 8, 2020, four UN Special Rapporteurs, whose mandates cover religious freedom, mental health, mi-nority rights, and protecting human rights in counterterrorism, wrote to the president. They criticized the Min-istry of Health’s amended guidelines as arbitrary and discriminatory – not only making cremation mandatory is not based on science, but also dispro-

portionately impairs the Muslim mi-nority’s right to freely practice their re-ligion. The requirement of cremation is also counterproductive. They argue that by “provoking the reluctance of families and communities to report COVID-19 cases in fear that they may be unable [to] ensure proper funeral or burial rights for their loved ones,” the disease is more likely to spread.

The government’s response to COV-ID-19 must not be viewed in a vacu-um. A year ago, Sri Lanka suffered its worst terrorist attacks when IS-linked extremists bombed churches and lux-ury hotels. The previous government had intelligence reports that Zahra-nHashim intended to carry out attacks on churches and tourist sites, but these warnings were completely ignored. The blasts killed 269 civilians, 45 of them children, on one of the Chris-tians’ holiest day. There has been no effort to create a safe space for commu-nities to mourn and offer condolence. To date no one has been prosecuted for this heinous crime, but people’s un-derstandable fears have strengthened the power of the military and security agencies and increased anti-Muslims attacks and hate-mongering.

After the Easter attacks, Muslims faced immediate retaliation. Although Kathankudy Muslims had long warned government officials about Zahran, Muslims throughout the country be-came victims in the aftermath of the attacks. The same anti-Muslim senti-ment that propelled riots and mob vio-lence in Aluthgama and Dharga Town in 2014, and again in the Kandy Dis-trict in 2018, sparked violence against Muslim homes, businesses, and places of worship. A year ago, in Hettipola, a tiny town where Muslims had always lived alongside their Sinhalese neigh-bours in peace, mobs threw kerosene bombs at homes and mosques, forcing Muslims to run for their lives. Many Muslim women reported seeing police officers stand by as buses of Buddhist extremists arrived to join the riots. Ru-mours spread unchecked that Muslim restaurants were poisoning the food or that Muslim doctors were sterilizing Sinhala women. In Negombo, mobs threatened refugees and asylum seek-ers from Muslim countries, pressuring landlords to evict whole families over-night.

Authorities eventually stepped in and made pleas for calm, but not be-fore lives, businesses and properties were shattered. Hate mongering chief, VenGalagodaAththeGnanasara Thera jailed for contempt of court, received a presidential pardon and immediate-ly warned of a “carnival” if a Muslim minister and two Governors did not resign their posts. A ban on wearing face-veils – which had played no role in the Easter bombings – made every Muslim a perceived outsider and left many women afraid to leave their homes. Hundreds of Muslim men were rounded up under Emergency Regula-tions and the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), based on nothing more than owning Qurans or notebooks with Ara-bic script.

Nothing has been done since to reach out to these communities and rebuild trust. After the UN Special

Rapporteur for Freedom of Religion Ahmed Shaheed visited Sri Lanka, he cautioned that “Prior impunity has strengthened the anti-Muslim groups. Weak and un-coordinated responses to anti-Muslim violence have seen the rise in violence and attacks on indi-viduals and the communities in some parts of the country.” The government categorically rejected these findings on March 3 as “inaccurate,” dismissing outright what the Muslim minority and human rights groups know to be true.

During the lockdown the arrests of RamzyRazeek a social media activist and charged under ICCPR and He-jaazHizbullah, a well-known attorney being detained using the PTA, leave Muslims even more uncertain as to how to speak out without fear of retali-ation.

Prior to the election there was a talk about “one country and one law”. Mus-lim women’s rights activists had fought hard to reform the Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act to be on par with Sri Lanka’s other marriage laws, and the ground was set for such a reform. In-stead of carrying forward the process, however, the current government ap-pears ready to abolish the law, which shows how tolerant this government would be and how prepared it is to ac-cept the diversity and pluralism in our societies. Two private media channels currently appear hell bent on branding Muslims as the introducers, carriers and spreaders of COVID-19 in Sri Lan-ka. This has alienated Muslims further, and if continued at this rate, the hate campaign can curtail the community from coming forward voluntarily to report cases. It has also created a pic-ture for many Sinhalese of Muslims as unpatriotic and untrustworthy. This is an image that the extremist BoduBala-Sena (BBS) and its allies and certain politicians have been aggressively pro-moting since the end of the war.

This much we know to be true: a vi-rus cannot distinguish a Muslim from a Tamil or a Sinhalese, a Buddhist from a Catholic or Christian. To control its spread, it is critical for the government to take a science-based approach. Citi-zens must trust the government and feel safe to seek prompt medical atten-tion when they have symptoms. The current mandate for exclusive crema-tion and social ostracization of Mus-lims affected by COVID-19 will serve none of these goals. Instead, enforc-ing arbitrary directives in conflict with the WHO will only deepen distrust and prevent Muslims from seeking prompt testing and medical attention. It would be foolish to imagine that this global virus, which knows no international borders, can run unchecked within one community without affecting pub-lic health outcomes for us all. For the safety of all Sri Lankans, if nothing else, now is the time to build trust and ethnic harmony, not sow division.

-Shreen Abdul Saroor is a co-founder of Mannar Women’s De-velopment Federation (MWDF) and

Women’s Action Network, a collective of 11 women’s groups that have been

working on advocacy on women’s rights and

documentation with a focus in North and East of Sri Lanka

Scapegoating the Muslims By Shreen Abdul Saroor

6 MAY 15 - 17, 2020 WEEKEND EXPRESS

The fight against COVID-19 should not weaken the rule of law

Editorial of The NYT

America’s true COVID toll already exceeds 100,000

RETHINKING AMERICA

I’ve heard of Muslim women in America being taunted for wearing hijabs, I’ve heard of Jewish men being mocked for wearing yarmulkes and now I’ve heard it all: A friend of mine was cursed by a passing stranger the other day for wearing a protec-tive mask.

There is, of course, a rather nasty virus going around, and one way to lessen the chance of its spread, especially from you to someone else, is to cover your nose and mouth. Call it civic responsi-bility. Call it science.

But science is no match for tribalism in this dysfunctional country. Truth is whatever validates your prejudices, feeds your sense of grievance and fuels your antipathy toward the people you’ve decided are on some other side.

And protective masks, God help us, are tribal to-tems. With soul-crushing inevitably, these com-mon-sense precautions morphed into controversial declarations of identity. What’s next? Band-Aids?

“Wearing a mask is for smug liberals. Refusing to is for reckless Republicans.” That was the headline on a recent article in Politico by Ryan Lizza and Daniel Lippman that noted that “in a deeply polar-ized America, almost anything can be politicized.”

I quibble only with “almost.” And I submit that the entire story of our scattered, schizoid response to the coronavirus pandemic can be distilled into the glares, tussles, tweets, deference and defiance surrounding this simple accessory.

On Monday (11) the White House belatedly introduced a policy of mask-wearing in the West Wing — but it exempted President Donald Trump. See what I mean about mask as metaphor? Trump demands protection from everybody around him, but nobody is protected from Trump. Story of America.

My friend was standing on a street corner in the centre of a small town in New York. The state has decreed that people wear face coverings if they’re in public settings where they can’t be sure to stay six feet or more away from others. So my friend was following the rules, as were her two compan-ions. All three of them were masked.

And a man driving by shouted a profanity at them. Just two words. Just two syllables. You can probably guess which.

How did she know their masks were the trigger? She said that nothing else about the three of them could possibly have drawn any particular notice and judgment and that she’d encountered other evidence of objection to lockdowns, social distanc-ing and masks in this relatively rural and relatively conservative area. One man, she said, has been standing outside the local post office, yelling about government oppression and handing out flyers. She showed me one. It had an image of a face mask crossed out and said: “ATTN GOVERNMENT AGENTS. Please provide lawful and necessary consideration to aid the bearer in the unimpeded exercise of constitutionally protected rights.”

It’s not just her town. “Mask haters causing problems at retail establishments,” read a recent headline in the Illinois political newsletter Capitol Fax, which presented a compendium of reports from merchants around the state, including one in Dekalb who said that a customer wearing what looked like a hunting knife refused to follow Il-linois directives and wear a mask. Priorities.

When the president visited Phoenix a week ago, some residents who’d turned out to see him harangued journalists in masks, “saying how we’re only wearing masks to instil fear,” BrieAnna Frank, a reporter with The Arizona Republic, told Tom Jones of Poynter. Frank posted a Twitter thread with videos in which journalists were loudly ac-cused of being “on the wrong side of patriotism” and “like communists.”

Outside the state Capitol in Sacramento, Califor-nia, two days later, a woman held a sign that said: “Do you know who Dr. Judy Mikovits is? Then don’t tell me I need a silly mask.”

Mikovits is a discredited scientist whose wild assertions and scaremongering regarding vac-cines have made her a hero to conspiracy theorists and a social media and YouTube star. Naturally, masks factor into her repertoire. She has claimed that “wearing the mask literally activates your own virus.”

So masks are props in our polluted ecosystem of information. They’re also symbols of Ameri-can complacency. When the pandemic hit, there weren’t nearly enough of them, not even for medical workers, a shortage that more-prepared countries didn’t experience. And masks are emblems, maybe the best ones, of the Trump administration’s disregard for, and degradation of, experts and expertise. Last month, when Trump announced that the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention was recommending the use of masks, he went out of his way to make clear that he wouldn’t be wearing one and that no one else was obliged.

Is it any wonder that weeks later, Vice President Mike Pence went maskless to the Mayo Clinic? No. He had a boss to please. He had a statement to make. And the statement was that masks were for wimpy worrywarts keen to do whatever the eggheads and elites told them.

Those of us with masks on our faces or masks in our pockets, at the ready, are definitely doing what’s right, but we’re also making our own state-ments. I know this because I’ve hurriedly slipped my own mask on in uncrowded outdoor situa-tions where it almost certainly wasn’t necessary but where others were masked. I wanted to signal them. I wanted them to know: I take my own tiny role in vanquishing this pandemic seriously. Rugged individualism ends where dying on this breath-taking scale begins. There’s liberty and then there’s death.

I’ve often heard that this once-in-a-generation crisis will bring us together, making us realize how much we need one another.

But it may well be driving us farther apart. Income inequality hasn’t been writ this large and gruesomely in decades. Red state vs. blue state and rural vs. urban tensions steer politicians’ and the public’s actions and words.

And a potentially lifesaving accommodation is a badge of so much — of too much — more. Masks have unmasked immeasurable distrust in America. Who’s working on the vaccine for that?

-New York Times

By spurning a mask, Trump elevates a symbol

By Frank Bruni

By Nicholas Kristof

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Wednesday (13) criticized congressional testimony delivered a day earlier by Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, who had warned against reopening the country too quickly and stressed the unknown effects the coronavirus could have on children returning to school.

“I was surprised by his answer,” Trump told reporters who had gath-ered in the Cabinet Room for the presi-dent’s meeting with the governors of Colorado and North Dakota. “To me it’s not an acceptable answer, especial-ly when it comes to schools.”

The president’s desire to reopen schools and businesses in order to bring back the economy has often led to public clashes over the guidance provided by Fauci, who has warned that taking a cavalier attitude toward

reopening the country could invite un-necessary suffering caused by a virus scientists are still struggling to un-derstand. He reiterated that position Tuesday in testimony before a Senate committee.

“He wants to play all sides of the equation,” Trump said Wednesday, before bragging that the economy next year would be “phenomenal.”

Fauci also told the Senate panel that a vaccine for the coronavirus would al-most certainly not be ready in time for the new school year, and warned of the dangers of the virus to children.

“I think we better be careful, if we are not cavalier, in thinking that children are completely immune to the delete-rious effects,” Fauci said. “You’re right in the numbers that children in gen-eral do much, much better than adults and the elderly and particularly those

with underlying conditions. But I am very careful, and hopefully humble in knowing that I don’t know everything about this disease. And that’s why I’m very reserved in making broad predic-tions.”

Fauci has increasingly become a tar-get of critics who see him as undermin-ing the president’s efforts to open up the country and restore the economy and as exaggerating the effects of the pandemic. A month ago, Trump made headlines for sharing a tweet with the hashtag “#FireFauci” after a series of reports detailed the president’s slow response to the threat of the virus.

The president’s comments Wednes-day were an even more direct show of disapproval. And they came as health officials in New York were investigat-ing more than 100 cases of a rare and dangerous inflammatory syndrome

that afflicts children and appears to be connected to the virus.

“Now when you have an incident, 1 out of a million, 1 out of 500,000, will something happen? Perhaps,” Trump said, minimizing the risk to children of returning to school. “But you can be driving to school and some bad things can happen, too.”

Trump added: “This is a disease that attacks age and it attacks health and if you have a heart problem, if you have diabetes, if you’re a certain age, it’s cer-tainly much more dangerous. But with the young children, I mean, and stu-dents, it is really just take a look at the statistics, it is pretty amazing.”

Medical experts who are beginning to learn more about how the virus affects children have said it is an oversimplifi-cation to consider them immune.

-New York Times

Trump pointedly criticizes Fauci for his testimony to Congress

By Katie Rogers

On Tuesday (12), lawyers for President Don-ald Trump appeared before the Supreme Court (hearing arguments again by telephone conference) to assert the claim that the na-tion’s chief executive is unaccountable to Con-gress or law enforcement authorities — that he is, in short, above the law.

The lawyers were trying to block three con-gressional committees and the Manhattan district attorney from getting access to years of Trump’s tax returns and other financial re-cords, as well as those of his family members and companies. The House committees said they subpoenaed those records to help them address concerns over Trump’s possible con-flicts of interest and to consider legislation relating to government ethics, banking and foreign interference in elections. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance issued his own subpoena as part of what appears to be an investigation into possible campaign-finance violations by Trump and his aides both before and after he became president.

It’s useful to remember that these cases might not have been necessary if Trump hadn’t broken one of his first promises to the American people four years ago.

Back in 2016, candidate Trump said he would be happy to share his tax returns with the public, as every major candidate for presi-dent had done without hesitation for four decades. The only problem, Trump claimed, was that he was under audit — remember the audit? — and so he couldn’t share his returns at the moment. But soon, he promised.

Trump has been president for more than three years. He is campaigning for another term, and yet Americans are still in the dark when it comes to his vast web of corporate en-tities and how their finances and operations may influence his decisions as a candidate and president.

This isn’t an idle concern. Trump’s tax ma-noeuvres have for decades skirted the edge of legality. In the end, the records may not show evidence of criminal misconduct. But a ruling by the Supreme Court that in essence gives presidents immunity from investigation and prosecution would be a grievous wound to the rule of law.

Trump lost both cases involving the House subpoenas in the lower federal courts, and no surprise: Congress has broad authority to is-sue subpoenas for all kinds of information. The president’s lawyers argued Tuesday that the Democratic-led House is on a fishing ex-pedition, acting like prosecutors and trolling for evidence that might hurt Trump politi-cally.

But the Supreme Court has repeatedly ap-proved congressional subpoenas so long as they have a plausible legislative purpose, even if other motives might also be involved. That’s a concept Trump should be familiar with; the “mixed motive” defence was a central element of his case for acquittal during his impeach-ment trial.

Trump has argued that responding to these subpoenas would distract him from doing his job. That’s a real concern, but Trump’s law-yers failed to make the case. Anyway, it hasn’t worked in the past: President Bill Clinton tried it in 1998, hoping to toss out a sexual-harassment lawsuit brought against him by Paula Jones. The justices ruled against him, 9-0.

President Richard Nixon got the same re-sult when he tried to prevent prosecutors from getting his Oval Office tapes on the ground that they were protected by executive privilege.

Trump doesn’t have as strong a claim as either of his predecessors, since the records now being sought aren’t government docu-ments possibly subject to privilege; and they aren’t even in Trump’s possession — they are sought from his accountants and bankers — so it’s not a burden for him to hand them over.

Presidents have a difficult job. They may enjoy certain protections the rest of us don’t, including immunity from indictment while in office (although that is a matter of legal in-terpretation, not law). But that doesn’t mean they are free to ignore the law as they see fit. Nixon and Clinton both got that message, loud and clear, from a unanimous court.

Remember when Trump said he’d be happy to share his tax returns?

Many supporters of President Don-ald Trump believe that the figures for coronavirus fatalities are in-flated, and Trump himself shared a tweet doubting the accuracy of some virus figures.

He’s right that the death toll seems off — but not in the direction he would suggest. We’ve crunched the numbers, state by state, and it appears that somewhere around 100,000 to 110,000 Americans have already died as a result of the pandemic, rather than the 83,000 whose deaths have been attributed to the disease, COVID-19.

That’s my estimate reached with the help of a Harvard statistician, Rafael Irizarry, based on a com-parison of death rates this spring with those in previous years. Some states have been largely unaffected — death rates in some even appear to have dropped, perhaps because of less driving and fewer car accidents — but others have seen huge surges in deaths.

Overall, in a bit more than two months, the United States lost more Americans to the coronavirus than died over seven decades in the Kore-an, Vietnam, Persian Gulf, Afghani-stan and Iraq Wars.

Here’s how we reached our esti-mates; they are not definitive, for they are based on preliminary data. The starting point is that the cause of death is often uncertain. Most people who die don’t get an autopsy, and many never had a coronavirus test. The precise number who died from COVID-19 is in some sense un-knowable.

Still, one standard approach to measure the impact of a pandemic like this is to look at “excess deaths,” meaning mortality greater than the average for a particular time period.

For example, for the seven weeks ending April 25 in the United States, about 70,000 more Americans died than is normal for those weeks (death is seasonal and normally declines over the course of spring and summer). That 70,000 figure for excess deaths does not include Connecticut, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, which were excluded because of missing or dubious data.

The official number of COVID-19 deaths in that period for the rest of the country was 49,100. That sug-gests an undercount of more than 20,000 coronavirus-related deaths as of April 25.

Add those 20,000 missed deaths to today’s total of 83,000, and you already get more than 100,000 pan-

demic-related deaths. But the un-dercount probably continued after April 25, albeit at a lower rate.

We don’t have good enough mor-tality data to assess excess deaths in late April and early May, a period in which more than 30,000 Americans are reported to have died of COV-ID-19. Testing increased significant-ly, and over time, doctors seemed more willing to list COVID-19 as the cause of death.

“There’s probably less underre-porting as time goes on,” notes Rob-ert N. Anderson, the chief of mortal-ity statistics at the CDC’s National Centre for Health Statistics. In New York City, a study likewise found enormous underreporting in the first half of April, then gradually di-minishing by the beginning of May.

In the period we looked at, the undercount also diminished. Ini-tially, there were more than twice as many excess deaths as reported coronavirus deaths, but by April 25 there were only 40% more. If the undercount thereafter were 10%, that would add a few thousand to the total, possibly bringing it closer to 110,000.

These numbers are uncertain, but the implication is that somewhere around 25,000 more Americans died as a result of the pandemic than are recorded in the death tallies.

This kind of analysis can’t deter-mine if they died directly from the virus or indirectly. Some presum-ably perished from heart attacks or strokes because they feared go-ing to hospitals and delayed calling 911, or because ambulance services were stretched thin. In other words, a modest number presumably died because of the virus without being infected by it.

One reason to think that a great majority of the excess deaths are di-rectly caused by the virus is that in some states that seem to have metic-ulous reporting, such as Massachu-setts, the number of excess deaths and the number of COVID-19 deaths are not so far apart.

Irizarry, who is also chairman of the department of data science at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, notes that our new esti-mates are built on several layers of uncertainty. It typically takes two months for deaths to be reported in a reasonably complete way, so one critical issue is how to adjust for lags in reporting. The CDC tries to estimate what the death total will eventually be based on incomplete reporting, and our estimates depend

on its algorithms.The idea that official figures are

undercounts is widely acknowl-edged. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci told a Senate health committee Tuesday (12) that he didn’t know if the real death toll was 50% higher than the official figures, but that “almost cer-tainly it’s higher.”

“Most frontline doctors will tell you that the numbers are grossly un-derreported,” said Michael P. Jones, an emergency medicine physician who works at hospitals in the Bronx that were particularly hard hit. Es-pecially in the early days, he said, many COVID-19 deaths were simply listed as some variant of “respira-tory failure” or “multisystem organ failure.”

Dr. Alicia Skarimbas, who prac-tices in New Jersey, said, “We signed so many death certificates, we would get behind and take turns doing them.”

Skarimbas said that she would list COVID-19 as the cause of death when that seemed obvious, but her partners might simply list “res-piratory failure” unless there had been a positive test for the virus. Thus it was often random whether COVID-19 was listed as the cause of death.

The undercounting is a global problem, not just one in the Unit-ed States. Dr. Christopher Murray of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington estimates that globally, excess deaths are about double the official COVID-19 death counts.

COVID-19 will inevitably continue to kill people in the weeks ahead. Those who die over the next week or two have already been infected, perhaps several weeks ago. Dr. Tom Frieden, a former director of the CDC, notes that even if one could end all new infections, thousands would still die from infections al-ready contracted.

Given the uncertainty and the lags in data, why go through this exer-cise of estimating deaths? Because flawed numbers based on an under-count are already a central part of the discussion, informing policy de-cisions, and Trump has made them so.

“We have saved thousands and thousands of lives,” he said on May 1. “Hopefully, we are going to come in below that 100,000 lives lost.” In that context, it seems worthwhile to note that this milestone has already been exceeded.

-New York Times

A body being taken through a courtyard to a refrigerator truck at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center in Brooklyn last month - Stephanie Keith/ The New York Times

7WEEKEND EXPRESS MAY 15 - 17, 2020

SRI LANKA FOCUSSRI LANKA FOCUS

Transforming how tea is bought and sold in Sri Lanka

What lies beneath the surfaceBy Kris Thomas and Sakeena Razick

By Geoff Spencer

During most crises, the effects felt are un-even. The repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic have been twofold; a direct re-sult of the crisis as well as the state's re-sponse to it. While the lockdown has been a measure implemented to mitigate the threat of COVID-19, it has produced un-intended consequences and circumstances that are yet to be addressed.

In Sri Lanka, the efforts to control the spread of the viral disease, implemented since March, have challenged the live-lihoods and lives of several vulnerable groups. It has already created casualties of an extended curfew period for whom ‘stay-ing at home’ can mean unbearable pangs of hunger or abuse behind a closed door. The casualties are not just economical but also physical, social, and emotional.

A brief snapshot into the lives of the overlooked. Street cleaners and garbage collectors

Gamini Indralal (55) drives a garbage truck for the Kotte Municipal Council. “We are essential workers, so we have to work during curfew too,” he said, washing his hands with a bar of soap which he now car-ries around, after the COVID-19 outbreak.

Equipped with the mandatory face mask and gloves, Indralal and his fellow work-ers are on duty, working their respective garbage collecting routes. “Our salaries are paid. The cleaners are also showing up for work,” he said.

“When the lockdown was announced, I could have gone home to Kurunegala where my family lives,” Indralal said. “But I chose not to. It’s better to stay in Colom-bo. We get food and a bed to sleep in. And I send money to my family. It’s not so bad.”Domestic workers

“Most families who employ domestic workers do so to help them with their own workload. Now, with everyone home, and finances uncertain, be it middle-class or lower-middle-class, the need for a domes-tic worker is less,” MenahaKandasamy, founder of the Domestic Workers’ Union (DWU) said.

After curfew was imposed, domestic workers could not travel to work, and many who reside at their employers’ houses were asked to return to their hometowns.

“No money means no food,” explained part-time domestic worker and President of the DWU, SarasgopalSatyavani. “Even if they [food lorries] bring food to our area, everyone struggles to purchase some-thing,” she said.

Domestic work in Sri Lanka is severely unrecognized and excluded from several labour laws. Although the union has been lobbying for laws that benefit the workers, Kandasamy fears that in light of the COV-ID-19 crisis, the process will be delayed further. “The workers face not only short-term but also long-term consequences,” she added.

“In a situation where our employers themselves are struggling to keep their jobs, I do not know what kind of work will be there for domestic workers in the fu-ture,” Satyavani said.Victims of child abuse

The National Child Protection Author-ity (NCPA) has observed a rise in reports of child cruelty, following the COVID-19 lockdown.

“During this time that curfew has been in place, the NCPA’s 1929 hotline has re-corded 352 complaints,” Professor Mu-dithaVidanapathirana, Chairman of the NCPA told Roar Media. Out of this, 152 complaints are of cruelty, where children are victims of physical and psychological trauma at their own homes.

While previously, complaints of abuse were not always restricted to domestic en-vironments, reports during lockdown are different.

“Before the curfew, the NCPA received roughly 40 complaints a day, out of which four of them were cases of cruelty against children. What happened during the cur-few month (17 March - 17 April) was a sig-nificant increase in that. We noticed that cruelty cases went up to six cases, out of the 10 complaints we received every day,” he noted.

Just during this period, the percentage of child cruelty cases reported to the NCPA have increased from 10 to 60 percent. It is likely that many more go unheard.Three-wheeler drivers

Shihan Fareed (47) is known to many as ‘Thilas’ in his village. Usually, he wakes up early in the morning to take his children to school, before starting his work driving his three-wheeler.

“Sometimes I get hires soon after, but at other times I have to wait for a while. De-pending on the day, I can earn between Rs. 2,000-2,500 on average,” he said. “Some-times more, sometimes less.”

These days, Thilas has no income due to the lockdown in place. He lives with his wife, four children, and mother. His oldest daughter’s husband (currently a trainee at the post-office, earning a small stipend) and child also make up the entire house-hold.

As the sole breadwinner, he has had to depend on donations and help from neigh-bours, friends, and relatives.

“We all live in the same village, and con-sider ourselves one and the same,” he said.Day labourers

Sarath* (62) is a labourer attached to the Kotte Municipal Council. He was paid his last salary by his employer, but other benefits and overtime payments had been cut off. “The first week of curfew was really difficult. We were supposed to receive aid from the nagharasabha (Municipal Coun-cil) but we didn’t,” he said.

As an essential worker attached to the Municipal Council, nowadays he occasion-ally gets called into work, without any re-muneration. He also used to clean houses regularly in order to earn some extra mon-ey. After the lockdown, however, this too has come to a halt. Sarath and his wife live in Bandaranaikepura, Rajagiriya. Their

son, Malith*, said it was impossible for his parents to buy anything even when the food lorries started coming in. “Whenever the lorries came it would only go to some houses. By the time it reached us, every-thing was over,” he said.

However, things changed over the past few weeks, and goods were made available to everyone.

“Right now it’s manageable,” Malith said. “But what happens when we run out of money? How are we going to buy any-thing from the lorries? There are so many families in Bandaranaikepura who are al-ready facing this situation. If the lockdown continues, what is going to happen when my family has no money to buy anything?”Pensioners

Nimali Jayawardana (83) receives two pensions, both of which belonged to her late husband. One is for his service as an officer in the Sri Lanka Army. The second, for his work at the United Nations office in Sri Lanka.

“On a normal day, amma would receive her first payment to the post office and the other one would be deposited to her bank straight away,” Jayawardana’s daughter, Crishanthi said. “This time, it was differ-ent.”

Due to the lockdown in place, the Sri Lankan government implemented a strat-egy to hand-deliver the payments to retir-ees and their families via postal officers on April 2 and 3. “Amma received that pay-ment, from which we purchased her medi-cine. But it was not enough and she has a doctor’s appointment coming up soon. We were hoping to receive the other pension allowance as well, but we don’t think it will arrive anytime soon,” she said.

Factory workers

“The first few days of curfew were re-ally difficult,” said Mala* (27), a factory worker at the Katunayake Export Process-ing Zone,. “I kept wondering if the food we have in our room was enough, but I was grateful that we had water to drink,” she said.

When curfew was first imposed, among the many stranded away from their home-towns were workers employed at garment factories, living in boarding houses within EPZs.

A week after, transport was provided for these workers who wished to travel back home. Some chose to stay behind and since then, have returned to work amidst the lockdown.

Currently, a few factories have reo-pened, after adopting new safety meas-ures against the COVID-19 crisis. Mala is waiting to hear back from her company so that she can go back to work. “I was paid for March and April, but was told that May depends on my willingness to come into work,” she said.

However, not all workers have continued to receive a salary. They wonder about the months to come, as they form an integral part of the country’s apparel sector—esti-mated to be one of the hardest hit in the current economy. Tap the link in our bio to learn more about the uncertain wage of factory workers, in Sri Lanka.

Victims of domestic violence

Ever since the COVID-19 curfew was im-posed, non-profit organisation Women In Need (WIN) has observed an increase in domestic violence reports. With over 450 calls and an increase in new callers, 75% of calls received are from victims of domestic abuse.

“Domestic violence is not a new issue. But, where there is a curfew, with financial and social pressures, children at home, and no travel—it is worse when you are locked in with an abuser,” said Project and Legal Manager of WIN, Mariam Wadood.

In addition to counselling services, WIN works with the Police to intervene and when possible, transport victims to three shelters in Matara, Batticaloa, and Co-lombo. However, the organisation faces challenges of its own; with travel restric-tions, limited number of shelters, and a law enforcement directed at tackling the COVID-19 crisis. In addition to reports of domestic abuse, the organisation receives calls asking for rations, general assistance, legal advice, custody-related queries and reports of cyber harassment.

Wadood pointed to how stereotyped roles of men and women play a large role in the rising trend of domestic feuds and violence. “There are expectations of each gender, for example, the women must cook and clean, and these roles are not flexible,” she said.

She also noted that at a time where vio-lence against women is exacerbated, the availability of only an ad-hoc system to support victims of abuse becomes more pronounced. Textile shop-owner

Ramanathan (50) is from Kandy, but owns and manages his own cut-piece tex-tile shop located on Negombo Road. It is his main source of income to support his family who lives back in Kandy.

He used to visit them occasionally when-ever he could catch a break. But ever since the COVID-19 curfew began, he has not been able to travel home and has been con-fined to his shop. It was during this time that he decided to start stitching masks and gloves using the material he had stored at the shop. His son too has been assisting him, and with the shop closed for sale, he thought this could generate an income for the both of them to survive on.

Ramanathan also felt that by selling these items at a reasonable price where there is a demand for it, he would be pro-viding a service to the community. With permission obtained from the Police, he managed to set up his three-wheeler to sell his products to the public.

People travelling along the Negombo Road stop by to buy these masks and gloves from him. He also sells braided ropes which are used to hold down goods when transporting. According to Ramana-than even the little money he makes out of this, he is unable to send to his family due to his banking limitations. He has regis-tered with the Police with the hopes that they will soon allow him to travel to see his family.

*—names changed to protect identity. Images are not direct representations of the stories featured.

The article was originally featured on roar.media

Boil the kettle, fill the pot, and raise a cele-bratory cup. Sri Lanka’s renowned tea indus-try has just dodged a potentially devastating COVID-19 shutdown by swapping 19th-cen-tury tradition with 21st-century digital inno-vation.

Within a matter of days, industry lead-ers were able to deploy a virtual e-auction system that keeps buyers and sellers of the world’s favourite beverage safely apart and socially distanced. Thanks to the agility and security of the cloud, they can stay still do business away from their usually crowded sales halls. And that, in turn, safeguards the livelihoods of almost two million people who rely on tea growing, production, and exports.

Tropical Sri Lanka, known as Ceylon in British colonial days, has been growing pre-mium teas since the days of the East India Company around 150 years ago, and it re-mains one of the world’s great producers.

Every day across the island nation’s cool and misty highlands, teams of pickers mani-cure rows of bushes by hand on plantations and estates, large and small.

Picking, sorting, processing, and grading tea leaves make up the fabric of life here. And ensuring that people around the globe get their daily cups of chai, Earl Grey, Eng-lish breakfast, or Orange Pekoe is crucial to the local economy and jobs.

To maintain all the above, this multimil-lion-dollar industry relies on the Colombo Tea Auction – a weekly event that has been held in the national capital under rules and procedures largely unchanged since they were first laid down in the 1880s and 1890s.

Until now, putting lots of fine Ceylon tea under the hammer and up for export was a noisy and very physical affair. Bidding ech-oed in rapid-fire across the three theatre-like auction rooms that were often packed with hundreds of brokers and officials, many of them jotting down numbers of paper sheets.

This ritual ended in mid-March, not be-cause it was regarded as old-fashioned or in-efficient, but as a matter of health and safety.

“When the COVID-19 pandemic hit our country, it was impossible for our traditional tea auction to follow social distancing and other health guidelines,” recalls Jayantha Edirisinghe, Sri Lanka’s Tea Commissioner.

The auction schedule was suspended for two weeks. With a potentially devastat-ing economic shock looming, the Sri Lanka Tea Board and its Tea Traders Association turned to a local Microsoft partner, CICRA Solutions, to create a fast digital alternative that would also incorporate the spirit and ways of the old system.

The company had previously scored suc-cesses for the industry by automating its complex tea brokering practices and by mod-ernizing the Tea Board’s back-office system. Now, with the pandemic worsening, the time had come for a digital transformation of the whole auction process.

With some guidance from Microsoft’s ex-perts, CICRA Solutions moved ahead with a two-step approach. Eventually, it would develop an advanced e-auction platform for long-term use. But in a crucial first stage, it quickly developed a Minimum Viable Prod-uct (MVP) solution that re-established busi-ness continuity.

Buying and selling are now conducted safely and securely via Microsoft Azure, with traders bidding virtually from their homes or offices. The first e-auction went off well with high demand.

“It was quite a challenging project for all of us,” says BuddhikaGayan, Engineering Manager at CICRA Solutions. “We had only six days to complete the product and manage the full development lifecycle.”

Because of restrictions on movement around Colombo, “all team members worked and contributed from home, which was made easy by Microsoft Teams.”

“Azure SQL services were used for data-base hosting. Therefore, it was much easier to do the configurations while doing speedy development. It was a plus point that we could scale up the servers as per the perfor-mance requirements,” Gayan says.

“For the application server, we used Azure App Services. UAT and production environ-ments are managed in different deployment slots. As there was a requirement to restrict the access, we used Azure CDN and the geo-filtering features. During the live operation, we monitored system performance using Ap-plication Insights. It was very useful to take necessary actions related to product scaling.

“Our long-term objective is to further de-velop this solution into a world-class tea and commodity auction solution with AI and an-alytics and then market that globally.”

Stakeholders on all sides of the tea indus-try have praised CICRA Solutions for deploy-ing its impactful solution so quickly.

Anil Cooke, who heads a task force at the Ceylon Tea Trade Association, says the e-auction solution “has transformed the lives of almost two million people in the Sri Lanka tea industry by sheltering them from the consequences of a COVID-19 shutdown.”

“The e-auction, with all its competitive-ness and nuances, was launched in less than a week through herculean effort, dedication, strong collaboration between stakeholders, and very smart and tireless work by CICRA,” he says.

Eashan Perera, who is Deputy General Manager at Talawakelle Tea Estates PLC, de-scribed the switch as “an absolute blessing” that “has injected much-needed cash flows into the plantation sector at a time when the pandemic has crippled many (other) indus-tries.”

-Microsoft Asia

8 MAY 15 - 17, 2020 WEEKEND EXPRESS

Unseen and untold COVID-19 stories Unseen and untold COVID-19 stories

Brewing up change Brewing up change under COVID-19 under COVID-19

A vendor wearing a facemask sells bottled drinks at a vegetable market in Colombo on April 4, 2020

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