Watch full unedited video of new cabinet swearing in ceremony of United National Font (UNF) Government which held on 20th Dec’2018.
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Following are the list of newly appointed cabinet members.
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01. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesighe – Ministry of National Policies and Economic Affairs, Ministry of Rehabilitation and Prison reforms, Northern Development, Vocational Training, Skill Development and Youth Affairs.
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02. John Amaratunga – Minister of Tourism Development and Christian Religious Affairs.
03. Gamini Jayawickrema Perera– Minister of Buddha Sasana & North Western Province Development.
04. Mangala Samaraweera – Minister of Finances and Media
05. Lakshman Kiriella– Minister of Public Enterprise Development, Upcountry Heritage and Kandy Development
06. Rauff Hakeem – Minister of Town Planning, Water Supply and Higher Education
07. Tilak Marapana – Minister of Foreign Affairs
08. Rajitha Senarathne – Minister of Health, Nutrition and Indigenous Medicine
09. Ravi Karunanayake- Minister of Power and Energy and Business Development
10. Vajira Abeywardhane– Minister of Internal & Home Affairs, Provincial Councils and Local Government
11. Rishad Bathiudeen– Ministry of Industry and Commerce and Resettlement and Cooperative Development
12. Patali Champika Ranawaka– Ministry of Megapolis and Western Development
13. Naveen Dissanayake– Minister of Plantation Industries
14. P. Harrison– Minister of Agriculture, Rural Economic Affairs and Animal Husbandry Development.
15. Kabeer Hashim – Minister of Highways and Road Development and Petroleum Resources Development.
16. Ranjith Maddumabandara – Minister of Public Administration and Disaster Management
17. Gayantha Karunathilake – Minister of Lands and Parliamentary Reforms
18. Sajith Premadasa – Minister of Housing, Construction and Cultural affairs.
19. Arjuna Ranatunga – Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation
20. Palani Digambaran – Minister of Upcountry New Villages, Infrastructure and Community Development
21. Chandrani Bandara – Minister of Women and Child Affairs and Development of Dry Zones
22. Thalatha Athukorale – Minister of justice and Prison Reforms
23. Akila Viraj kariyawasam – Minister of Education
24. Abdul Haleem Mohamed Hashim – Minister of Postal Services and Muslim religious Affairs
25. Sagala Ratnayake – Minister of Ports, Maritime Affairs and Southern Development
26. Harin Fernando – Minister of Telecommunication, Digital Infrastructure facilities, Foreign Employment and Sports
27. Mano Ganeshan – Minister of National Integration, Official Languages, Social Progress and Hindu Religious Affairs
28. Daya Gamage – Minister of Labour, Trade Union Relations and Social Empowerment
29. Malik Samarawickrema – Minister of Development Strategies, International Trade, Science, Technology and Research.
One person has died and two were injured after the bodyguards of a Sri Lankan government minister opened fire on a crowd amid a deepening constitutional crisis in the island nation.
Arjuna Ranatunga, the petroleum minister and a former Sri Lankan cricket captain, was trying to enter a government agency in the capital, Colombo, at about 3pm on Sunday when he was confronted by supporters of the president, Maithripala Sirisena.
Amid jostling, Ranatunga’s bodyguards opened fire, injuring three people, two of them critically, according to the police spokesman Ruwan Gunasekera. One of the injured died later in a Colombo hospital.
Ranatunga was rushed into the building in the aftermath of the shooting and had to be rescued by paramilitary police units. He was ushered out in a police uniform and wearing a bulletproof vest and helmet.
Sunday’s incident is the first outbreak of violence since Sirasena shocked the country on Friday night by announcing the dismissal of the prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, with whom Ranatunga was aligned.
Wickremesinghe says his dismissal is unconstitutional and has refused to vacate Temple Trees, the prime ministerial residence that was surrounded by his supporters.
One of Ranatunga’s bodyguards was arrested and the area around the government office was tense on Sunday night with a heavy police presence and crowds protesting against the shooting. Police leave has been cancelled and soldiers were deployed in parts of Colombo in what was seen as a show of strength.
Human rights groups on Sunday voiced concerns about the replacement prime minister, the former president Mahinda Rajapaksa, whose decade-long rule was marred by allegations of extrajudicial killings, media harassment and corruption.
A crowd gathers outside the state-run Ceylon Petroleum Corporation office in Colombo, where the shooting took place.Photograph: MA Pushpa Kumara/EPA
Since his swearing in on Friday, Rajapaksa has strived to appear in control of the government, posing in photographs with the chief of police, receiving an official visit from the Chinese ambassador and visiting a Buddhist temple in the central district of Kandy to seek blessings for his administration.
Supporters of Wickremesinghe have argued his sacking was illegal because the Sri Lankan constitution prevents a president from dismissing a prime minister unless he has died, resigned or lost the confidence of parliament.
Wickremesinghe, whose United National party (UNP) holds a plurality in parliament, had immediately called for an emergency confidence vote, but was stymied on Saturday when Sirasena announced the suspension of the assembly until mid-November.
The speaker of the house supported Wickremesinghe, saying he should retain the security and privileges of prime minister was fair until another candidate could prove a majority in parliament.
Karu Jayasuriya recognised Wickremesinghe “as the leader of the government who has obtained a mandate to secure democracy and good governance” and warned the president that shutting parliament for nearly three weeks would exacerbate the political crisis.
In the meantime, Rajapaksa is trying to win over UNP members of the 225-seat parliament. About five MPs have defected since Friday and 13 more are thought to be required to give the strongman leader a clear majority when parliament resumes on 16 November.
The UNP plans to protest in Colombo on Monday, while presidential officials say they will seek a court order to evict Wickremesinghe, whose security and official cars have been withdrawn.
Rajapaksa is yet to make a formal statement since his elevation to PM but told a monk on Sunday he believed he had a majority backing him in parliament.
The Buddhist nationalist leader was ousted in 2015 when Wickremesinghe and Sirasena, a former Rajapaksa ally, joined forces to defeat his government. They promised an end to the allegations of corruption, nepotism and human rights abuses that surrounded Rajapaksa’s regime.
But the coalition of the two traditionally opposing parties has grown increasingly unpopular, while the relationship between the two leaders has become more openly hostile, culminating in Friday’s sacking. Sirasena attacked Wickremasinghe in a speech on Sunday, accusing him of arrogance and arbitrary decision making.
Rajapaksa’s return would be greeted warily in western capitals and India, in part because of his authoritarian tendencies but also because of his closeness to China, which has been using its financial heft to grow its influence in south Asia.
Activists, especially among the country’s Tamil minority, are also concerned. Rajapaksa oversaw the end of the country’s nearly three-decade-long civil war against the separatist Tamil Tigers in 2009 after a series of brutal military offensives in which up to 40,000 civilians were killed, according to UN estimates.
Iron cannons installed by the Dutch to ward off colonial rivals still line Galle Face Green, a grassy, mile-long promenade along the Colombo seafront. Further out to sea, within range of the guns, a new world power is leaving its mark on Sri Lanka’s capital.
Currently, Port City is just a flat expanse of blank land jutting out into the ocean, growing a fraction larger each day, as dredging ships pour what will eventually amount to 65 million cubic metres of sand.
Within a few years, however, Port City will be the site of glass skyscrapers, a busy financial district, hospitals, hotels and even a theme park. Across the world, Chinese companies are developing President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative by building new roads, ports and bridges – but in Sri Lanka they are building a whole new metropolis.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative is a huge, $1tn infrastructure project to better connect China – and Chinese goods – with the rest of the world. It is meant to be a 21st-century “silk road”, made up of a “belt” of overland corridors (including roads, bridges and railways) and a maritime “road” of shipping lanes.
Its wider ambitions are harder to pin down. Is it a bid by China for world domination, or simply a move to prop up Chinese companies at home? Is there a grand strategy, or is it just a rebranding of existing projects?
In Cities of the New Silk Road we have endeavoured to find out, by exploring the project’s tangible results so far – from the newly built city of Khorgos on the Kazakhstan border to Duisburg, dubbed “Germany’s China city”. Our correspondents have reported from the “next Dubai” rising out of the sea in Sri Lanka, the nascent port of Gwadar in a restive province of Pakistan, the sleepy Tanzanian village that could be transformed into Africa’s largest port, and more. Nick Van Mead
“It is a completely new city that will nearly double the size of Colombo right now,” says Janaka Wijesundara, a former director at Sri Lanka’s Urban Development Authority. “It is going to drastically change the entire landmass.”
Built on 665 acres (2.6 sq km) of land being reclaimed from the Indian Ocean, the city is designed to be a smaller Singapore, with its own business-friendly tax regime and regulations – and possibly a different legal system to the rest of Sri Lanka.
About 80,000 people are expected to live in the city, with another quarter of a million commuting in every day.
How will the burgeoning city affect the rest of Colombo? Photograph: Alamy
It is the largest single foreign direct investment in Sri Lankan history – a $1.4bn (£1.1bn) project by the state-owned Chinese engineering firm China Communications Construction Company (CCCC).
Artistic impressions of the future Port City show a brightly lit cityscape comparable to Dubai or London’s Canary Wharf. Developers say 1.5 million sq metres of office space will be available and private investment could reach $13bn. Dense high-rises give way to lower-slung residential areas, crisscrossed by parks and canals. A marina and beach line the city’s edges.
It is a world away from the fading bungalows, modest temples and low-slung towers of present-day Colombo. But designers say they have striven to have the new city reflect its roots, according to Daniel Ringelstein, a director at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), the firm that created the masterplan for the city’s central business district.
“We took inspiration from the colonial era,” he says, highlighting Colombo’s whitewashed colours, elegant arcades and “individually expressed, vertically proportioned buildings” as key influences.
The mega-blocks initially favoured by the developers were subdivided by the firm, he says, to create more walkable public space, mimicking the vivid street life of Sri Lankan cities and including an emphasis on natural shade.
The idea to expand Colombo’s business district outward on to land reclaimed from the sea was first proposed in 2004. The city, located along key shipping routes across the Indian Ocean, had been a hub for trade for more than 2,000 years.
But a bloody, 25-year civil war was killing thousands of people each year. Around the time authorities were mulling an early version of Port City, Colombo was struck by its first suicide bombing since 2001. The plans were shelved for five years.
By 2009, the war had been brought to a close, thanks to ruthless offensives by the Sri Lankan army. Then-president Mahinda Rajapaksa declared Sri Lanka open for business – but the spectre of what the UN calls “horrific” human rights abuses committed by both the army and the Tamil Tigers continued to ward off most investors.
One major country, however, was happy to fund Sri Lanka’s reconstruction. “China offered political cover for Sri Lanka towards the end of the war and had already started to play more of a prominent role on the economic front,” says Dushni Weerakoon, the executive director at the Institute of Policy Studies in Colombo. “After the war ended, it all just accelerated.”
In total, Rajapaksa borrowed about $8bn from China, much of which was spent on big-ticket infrastructure in his ancestral home district of Hambantota – which has since become a byword for the risks associated with Chinese loans. A major new airport in Hambantota receives just one flight each day. A new hospital serves as accommodation for Chinese guest workers. Attracting most scrutiny is a port that was upgraded using money borrowed from China. Earlier this year, unable to afford the repayments, Sri Lanka handed control of the port to a subsidiary of CCCC for at least 99 years.
The loans are part of a wave of Chinese investment in south Asia that has been described as “the biggest game changer in 100 years”, posing a serious challenge to India, the traditional power in the region.
In 2014, concerns over Chinese loans and corruption played a key part in Rajapaksa’s shock election defeat. The new government promised to rebalance Sri Lanka’s relationship with India, Japan and the west. Though Port City was being funded by foreign investment, rather than a loan, it became a victim of the backlash: the new prime minister, Ranil Wickramasinghe, shelved the project, claiming the dredging would destroy Colombo’s coast.
Environmentalists have raised serious concerns about the impact of the extensive dredging required by the project. Photograph: Dinuka Liyanawatte/Reuters
It was a win for environmentalists such as Hemantha Withanage, who heads the Colombo-based Centre for Environmental Justice (CJE). “The project is totally harmful to tourism and totally harmful to fishermen,” he says.
W Jude Namal Fernando, a fisherman and trade unionist in Negombo, north of Colombo, says the excavation of sand along the coast is destroying aquatic life and affecting the livelihoods of approximately 8,000 people who make a living from fishing. “The habitat belonging to various species has been demolished,” he says. “Corals have been removed, disturbing the ecological balance. And the fisheries industry consists of many others apart from fishermen – the livelihood of those who are on the shore and those who transport the catch to the market are also affected.”
The CJE argues that building the new city will require more natural resources than Sri Lanka can sustainably provide. The necessary sand alone would quickly exceed 100 million cubic metres, it says, threatening a fragile marine habitat and the livelihoods of 15,000 fishermen who work in the mining area. The CJE prices the value of the sand at $3.2bn, which it says outweighs the $1.4bn invested by CCCC subsidiary China Harbour in building the city.
The environmental group also warns commutes into the new financial district will add 300,000 daily car journeys, increasing airborne pollution in a city already exceeding World Health Organisation guidelines.
Yet about a year after suspending Port City, in March 2016 the new government announced work would soon resume. CCCC had been claiming to be losing $380,000 each day the project was on hold, and was threatening to sue for compensation. The government says its amended contract with the Chinese firm includes new environmental protections. In an attempt to ease Indian concerns, 20 hectares of Port City originally slated to be given to CCCC in perpetuity was instead granted on a freehold basis. The trucks and dredgers returned. Within two years, Port City was back on schedule, with land reclamation expected to finish by the end of 2018 and the first buildings expected to appear within four years.
As the project takes shape, key questions about how Port City will operate remain unanswered. The new contract has not been released to the public. Sri Lanka has promised its Chinese investors favourable tax rates and business-friendly regulations, but it may be limited in what it can provide, thanks to an IMF loan the country took in 2016 to help pay its debts. Sri Lankan ministers have also said Port City will operate under a separate “British-style” legal system – but what that will entail is unclear. Several requests were made to the government to clarify, with no response.
Sri Lankan activists have also raised questions about the power China Harbour will wield in the territory it leases in Port City, where it will effectively act as the landlord – a majority state-owned Chinese corporation deciding who can populate parts of a Sri Lankan city, and under what circumstances.
Port City is being constructed on land reclaimed from the Indian Ocean. The new city will nearly double the current size of Colombo. Photograph: Xinhua/Alamy Live News
Urban planners say another issue is unresolved: how the burgeoning city will affect the rest of Colombo. “That was the missing piece to the brief,” says Ringelstein. “How is this city connected to the historic city centre back to the east?”
SOM’s masterplan tried to resolve the problem by creating patches of green space in Port City that will provide views of Colombo. They also encouraged the government to regenerate the western edge of the old city, creating a frontage that looks out on the new one.
“The idea is to use green space as a way to mediate between the old and the new,” Ringelstein says. “You would hate for this new project to suck the life out of the existing city today.”
Wijesundara, the former Urban Development Authority director, says developers may not even want to establish links between the old and new cities. “I will say that Port City will be a separate entity where only a certain class of people will live,” he says. “Services may be provided by the local people, but the money coming to them is questionable.”
Researchers have created a wearable device that can read people’s minds when they use an internal voice, allowing them to control devices and ask queries without speaking.
The device, called AlterEgo, can transcribe words that wearers verbalise internally but do not say out loud, using electrodes attached to the skin.
“Our idea was: could we have a computing platform that’s more internal, that melds human and machine in some ways and that feels like an internal extension of our own cognition?” said Arnav Kapur, who led the development of the system at MIT’s Media Lab.
Kapur describes the headset as an “intelligence-augmentation” or IA device, and was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Intelligent User Interface conference in Tokyo. It is worn around the jaw and chin, clipped over the top of the ear to hold it in place. Four electrodes under the white plastic device make contact with the skin and pick up the subtle neuromuscular signals that are triggered when a person verbalises internally. When someone says words inside their head, artificial intelligence within the device can match particular signals to particular words, feeding them into a computer.
The computer can then respond through the device using a bone conduction speaker that plays sound into the ear without the need for an earphone to be inserted, leaving the wearer free to hear the rest of the world at the same time. The idea is to create a outwardly silent computer interface that only the wearer of the AlterEgo device can speak to and hear.
“We basically can’t live without our cellphones, our digital devices. But at the moment, the use of those devices is very disruptive,” said Pattie Maes, a professor of media arts and sciences at MIT. “If I want to look something up that’s relevant to a conversation I’m having, I have to find my phone and type in the passcode and open an app and type in some search keyword, and the whole thing requires that I completely shift attention from my environment and the people that I’m with to the phone itself.”
Maes and her students, including Kapur, have been experimenting with new form factors and interfaces to provide the knowledge and services of smartphones without the intrusive disruption they currently cause to daily life.
The AlterEgo device managed an average of 92% transcription accuracy in a 10-person trial with about 15 minutes of customising to each person. That’s several percentage points below the 95%-plus accuracy rate that Google’s voice transcription service is capable of using a traditional microphone, but Kapur says the system will improve in accuracy over time. The human threshold for voice word accuracy is thought to be around 95%.
Kapur and team are currently working on collecting data to improve recognition and widen the number of words AlterEgo can detect. It can already be used to control a basic user interface such as the Roku streaming system, moving and selecting content, and can recognise numbers, play chess and perform other basic tasks.
The eventual goal is to make interfacing with AI assistants such as Google’s Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri less embarrassing and more intimate, allowing people to communicate with them in a manner that appears to be silent to the outside world – a system that sounds like science fiction but appears entirely possible.
The only downside is that users will have to wear a device strapped to their face, a barrier smart glasses such as Google Glass failed to overcome. But experts think the technology has much potential, not only in the consumer space for activities such as dictation but also in industry.
“Wouldn’t it be great to communicate with voice in an environment where you normally wouldn’t be able to?” said Thad Starner, a computing professor at Georgia Tech. “You can imagine all these situations where you have a high-noise environment, like the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, or even places with a lot of machinery, like a power plant or a printing press.”
Starner also sees application in the military and for those with conditions that inhibit normal speech.
Sri Lankan women who take up domestic work in the Middle East to support families devastated by conflict are being targeted by recruitment agents who order them to take contraceptives before leaving.
Six recruiters licensed by the Sri Lankan government said they could provide an employer with a “three-month guarantee” that a maid would not become pregnant.
An agent from Gulf Jobs in Colombo, the Sri Lankan capital, said: “Before we can send a maid, there is a medical check-up by the government and no one can influence that. But once the medical test is done … there is a device we can give in them. If you want it, we can arrange it.”
While no women were prepared to speak openly about being forced to take contraceptives, the Guardian found that many recruitment agencies make migrant workers take Depo-Provera, an injectable contraceptive that lasts for three months.
Sri Lanka’s protracted civil war, which claimed the lives of tens of thousands of husbands, fathers and brothers, and took a severe physical or mental toll on countless other combatants, has left many Tamil women as the sole breadwinners for their families.
Rahini Bhaskaran, coordinator of Migrants Network, a migrant rights organisation, said women were so desperate for work that they complied unquestioningly with the stipulations of recruiters.
“Most women don’t know what the injections are for,” she said. “They are not told anything about it,” she said.
Bhaskaran believes the contraceptive serves a double purpose: covering up potential sexual assaults by recruitment agents and serving as a guarantee to prospective employers in the Gulf that workers will not get pregnant.
“Some women think it’s necessary … to have sex with the agents to go abroad. The agents coax women, even promising marriage in some cases, and then abuse them,” said Bhaskaran.
Typically single, divorced or widowed, or married to men who are no longer able to work, the women are victims of a growing pattern of abuse and coercion by agents and employers.
The experience of Saroja is indicative of the abusive behaviour that many endure. In 2016, a man turned up at her home in a small village in northern Sri Lanka with the offer of a job in the Middle East.
“They came looking for me,” she said. “They told me I could earn well if I went abroad and that they could help me to look after my family.”
Saroja’s son was ill and the civil war had left her husband disabled and her five sisters widowed. Struggling to shoulder the burden of caring for her extended family single-handedly, she accepted the offer. She sold her jewellery to pay the agency the equivalent of £200 for training, and left her village on the outskirts of Jaffna to take up employment as a household maid in Saudi Arabia.
But Saroja found it impossible to keep up with the cooking and cleaning required for the family of 12. She couldn’t send any money home to her family because she was never paid. Then her demanding boss turned abusive.
“My employer, he started beating me. I complained and he ripped off my clothes and I was just left in my underwear,” she said.
Two women, one from from Lebanon and one from Sri Lanka, wait for a bus in Beirut, the Lebanese capital.Photograph: Nabil Mounzer/EPA
Tamil women who endure such ordeals abroad are often stigmatised, as the need to work counters cultural tradition. Nonetheless, there are 1.5 million domestic workers in Saudi Arabia alone, and recruitment agencies fly in 40,000 foreign women a month to keep up with demand.
“People are forced to do these things because of economic problems,” said S Senthurajah, executive director of Sond, an organisation that raises awareness of migration issues. “Women have far less opportunities here for employment. If she’s poor or a widow, she’s excluded from the community. We do our best, but it’s not enough.”
According to Senthurajah, the dangers have become accepted to the point where it is almost expected that women who migrate to work in the Middle East will face abuse or assault at the hands of their employers.
“When a woman goes abroad it’s implicit she’s going to be sexually active,” he says. “The chance is high for abuse.”
Swairee Rupasinghe, coordinator for labour migration at the International Labour Organisation in Sri Lanka, said there was an economic imperative for recruiters to make women take contraceptives.
“I see why the recruitment agencies organise it – because if found pregnant they would have to bare the cost of repatriation of the worker, so it’s in their interest to enforce it,” said Rupasinghe.
Rothna Begum, women’s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch, said: “Migrant domestic workers in the Gulf are treated as commodities by agencies and employers to the extent that their bodies and their choices are no longer theirs at the point of migration. When they go into employment, it’s this power dynamic that allows exploitation and abuse to flourish.”
After eight months in Saudi Arabia, Saroja eventually arrived home with less than a dollar in her pocket.
“The agency keeps coming back telling me how poor we are and that I should go back for my children,” she said. “But I’ll never go back to Saudi Arabia again. I got nothing from it except pain. I’m holding on to life just because of my children.”
