Fish are chips in EU talks

 SHOVE YOUR OLIVE BRANCH: Has the EU done enough to break the Brexit deadlock? Not quite, said No 10. Brussels negotiator Michel Barnier said the bloc was prepared to “intensify” talks all areas of disagreement, including fishing and competition, “based on legal texts” – as per No 10’s request. But Downing Street rejected the olive branch. It is understood Boris Johnson’s team now wants further assurances that the EU accepts it will have to make concessions – particularly on fishing rights. David Frost said Monday’s chat with Barnier was “constructive”, but added: “The EU still needs to make a fundamental change in approach to the talks.” Frost and Barnier are expected to talk again over the next couple of days. Michael Gove was in chipper mood in the Commons about the state of play, saying “I prefer to look forward in optimism rather than to look back in anger.” Mr Glass Half Full also claimed Brexit lorry parks would create some wonderful new jobs.

                                                 

Theresa May was seen screwing her face up in horror at Michael Gove’s remarks on post-Brexit security. Gove replied to the former PM’s question about the terrible prospect of failing to agree a deal over information sharing by claiming security cooperation with the EU would be even better after Brexit – causing May to display her disgust and exclaim: “Whaaat?” Over in the Lords, the Archbishop of Canterbury denied religious leaders are “misinformed” for criticising the government’s Brexit bill, while former Speaker Betty Boothroyd said trust had “collapsed” over the government’s Brexit failings. Meanwhile, Robert Peston claimed the PM still doesn’t know if he actually wants a deal with the EU. One of Johnson’s close colleagues told the ITV host: “The PM is in two minds constantly over this. He doesn’t know whether he really wants one [a deal] so no one else [around him] does.” God help us.

Making poor people a lot poorer in Sri Lanka

The rate of poverty in Sri Lanka has come into highlight particularly after the pandemic and the sustainable economic goals, and rightly. 

Due to reforms in the country during the 1980's poverty was reduced throughout of the country, but since and after ten years of the war, although some geographical areas and some some employment sectors saw a greater reduction in poverty levels, today we are about to witness a spike in not only Covid-19, but more so of poverty in rural and in fact in some urban areas of our country. We can however,console ourselves that we are not alone in this conundrum, the whole world is in a state of flux.

This is partly due to price inflation, but more to do with the fear in our minds that we are not sure we can overcome the pandemic, if it goes on over a longer period than we originally imagined.

The thing about Sri Lanka rather than any other country, is that we have finally realised that our bread and butter lies with our rural population,our farmers,our agricultural sector, who have to provide our sustenance,during these perilous times, not the urban population who are either having to work part time,or work from home, or having the overhang of the threat to lose down factories, close our hospitality outlets and airports for the immediate present.

                                                   

Our make up   

According to Asanga Welikal in Groundviews : "Sri Lankans are an emotional people who like to register their political preferences in dramatic ways". We want to be ahead of the rest.

Our rural population may be considered comparatively poor but we are proud of our heritage, our religion and our way of life. We are fiends to all, and enemies to none. We are a small nation,the envy of many.

As regions far from urban and commercial centres may experience the most poverty today as nine out of ten of our population live in rural areas, we see the poverty rate is as much as 40 percent. The wages of rice and agricultural farmers has remained stagnant for years.

The cycle of poverty is because our rural population depend on the urban areas, particularly in the Western Province for their sustenance. When the urban areas are hit with the pandemic the ones who suffer most are the rural population. 

Many who are poor in Sri Lanka have no means of escaping the poverty trap either for themselves or for their children. It is difficult for the poor people to save money to secure themselves or their families from the shocks of illness or death. 

What governments in Sri Lanka have in the past always looked after the urban poverty rather than the rural poverty.  We have seen since independence a preponderance of effort for urban poverty.

Of course, there have been Sarvayoda, Samudhi, Gammadda and volunteer efforts by charitable institutions to look after the poor and the poorest of the poor. These programmes have only been able to scratch the surface of rural poverty.

New initiatives by President Gothabaya's Government

For the first time in the history of Sri Lanka that the Government of President Gothabaya has decided to put more emphasis on rural poverty, not alleviation but eradication.

For the first time in the history of Sri Lanka,the government has rescinded on aid given by a Foreign Government to develop a Light Railway Transport link from Colombo to Malabe in the populous Western Province, against all advice by vested interests, for the comfort of the more affluent in preference of giving emphasis to the resolving some of the problems of other parts of the island, with poverty eradication.

Sri Lanka always has wanted development of the richer parts of the country, in preference for finding solutions for eradication of the rural poverty. 

It is high time that money aid is devoted for not only poverty alleviation but for long term planning of not making poor people in the country a lot poorer.

A Plan of Action

Sri Lanka is made up of 14,000 Grama Niladhari divisions and over 35,000 villages. "Their complexity now demands a system of approach to understand the challenges faced by communities living in different regions.

It is water water everywhere,but nothing to drink. We have floods everywhere and scarcity of fresh drinking water for the rural poor. Developing and improving drinking water and watershed management strategies is in my opinion the most important need of the moment rather than Light Railway Transport. 

Life today is a choice of priorities. 

Victor Cherubim 

"Your World is killing life on Earth"

 This is my message to the western world – your civilisation is killing life on Earth

Nemonte Nenquimo

We Indigenous people are fighting to save the Amazon, but the whole planet is in trouble because you do not respect it

Waorani leader Nemonte Nenquimo shows evidence of crude oil contamination in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest. Photograph: Mitch Anderson / Amazon Frontlines

Mon 12 Oct 2020 10.00 BST

Dear Presidents



 



My name is Nemonte Nenquimo. I am a Waorani woman, a mother, and a leader of my people. The Amazon rainforest is my home. I am writing you this letter because the fires are raging still. Because the corporations are spilling oil in our rivers. Because the miners are stealing gold (as they have been for 500 years), and leaving behind open pits and toxins. Because the land grabbers are cutting down primary forest so that the cattle can graze, plantations can be grown and the white man can eat. Because our elders are dying from coronavirus, while you are planning your next moves to cut up our lands to stimulate an economy that has never benefited us. Because, as Indigenous peoples, we are fighting to protect what we love – our way of life, our rivers, the animals, our forests, life on Earth – and it’s time that you listened to us.

Goldmining having big impact on indigenous Amazon communities

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In each of our many hundreds of different languages across the Amazon, we have a word for you – the outsider, the stranger. In my language, WaoTededo, that word is “cowori”. And it doesn’t need to be a bad word. But you have made it so. For us, the word has come to mean (and in a terrible way, your society has come to represent): the white man that knows too little for the power that he wields, and the damage that he causes.

It took us thousands of years to get to know the Amazon rainforest. To understand her ways, her secrets, to learn how to survive and thrive with her. And for my people, the Waorani, we have only known you for 70 years (we were “contacted” in the 1950s by American evangelical missionaries), but we are fast learners, and you are not as complex as the rainforest.You are probably not used to an Indigenous woman calling you ignorant and, less so, on a platform such as this. But for Indigenous peoples it is clear: the less you know about something, the less value it has to you, and the easier it is to destroy. And by easy, I mean: guiltlessly, remorselessly, foolishly, even righteously. And this is exactly what you are doing to us as Indigenous peoples, to our rainforest territories, and ultimately to our planet’s climate.

When you say that the oil companies have marvellous new technologies that can sip the oil from beneath our lands like hummingbirds sip nectar from a flower, we know that you are lying because we live downriver from the spills. When you say that the Amazon is not burning, we do not need satellite images to prove you wrong; we are choking on the smoke of the fruit orchards that our ancestors planted centuries ago. When you say that you are urgently looking for climate solutions, yet continue to build a world economy based on extraction and pollution, we know you are lying because we are the closest to the land, and the first to hear her cries.

An illegallly lit fire in an Amazon rainforest reserve, in Para State, Brazil. Photograph: Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty Images

I never had the chance to go to university, and become a doctor, or a lawyer, a politician, or a scientist. My elders are my teachers. The forest is my teacher. And I have learned enough (and I speak shoulder to shoulder with my Indigenous brothers and sisters across the world) to know that you have lost your way, and that you are in trouble (though you don’t fully understand it yet) and that your trouble is a threat to every form of life on Earth.

You forced your civilisation upon us and now look where we are: global pandemic, climate crisis, species extinction and, driving it all, widespread spiritual poverty. In all these years of taking, taking, taking from our lands, you have not had the courage, or the curiosity, or the respect to get to know us. To understand how we see, and think, and feel, and what we know about life on this Earth.

'Total destruction': why fires are tearing across South America

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I won’t be able to teach you in this letter, either. But what I can say is that it has to do with thousands and thousands of years of love for this forest, for this place. Love in the deepest sense, as reverence. This forest has taught us how to walk lightly, and because we have listened, learned and defended her, she has given us everything: water, clean air, nourishment, shelter, medicines, happiness, meaning. And you are taking all this away, not just from us, but from everyone on the planet, and from future generations.

It is the early morning in the Amazon, just before first light: a time that is meant for us to share our dreams, our most potent thoughts. And so I say to all of you: the Earth does not expect you to save her, she expects you to respect her. And we, as Indigenous peoples, expect the same.

• Nemonte Nenquimo is cofounder of the Indigenous-led nonprofit organisation 

Market Power of Big Tech

Over months if not years, and over both sides of the “Big Pond,” Anti-Trust regulation has been contemplated to curb the concentrated power of “Big Tech” companies.

Five digital giants, Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft which make up a quarter of the value of the S&P 500 in the United States, have been closely watched both by the US Congress and the European Union.

This power has made US markets less competitive, particularly in relation to Europe.

It has also been argued by the US and European Union that that as many as 50 odd Big Tech Companies, including the above mentioned are trying hard to hide behind “free speech claims” in order to avoid the repeal of the legal loophole known in the States as Section 230,that allows them to “gobble up” advertising revenue and act like media companies “without taking responsibility for the content they put out on their platforms.

We are told that they have too much political power and control much of the economy  that both the United States and the European Union plan to impose new and stricter regulation on a selected “hit list” of 20 of the most powerful internet giants including Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple as early as December 2020 to subject these corporations to more stringent rules “in an effort to curb their market power”.

Will these monopolies lose their power on the internet?

It will be hard to imagine that the “Big Five of the Internet” who have dominated each of our use of the internet over years are going to sit back and watch their power or their money which they have accumulated over decades.

The fact that no one recognises is that these conglomerates perform their digital transactions which are valued not in dollars, but Data.

This makes it extremely hard to prove that they are an “economic harm” because these conglomerates also control access to the algorithms that help shape their transactions.

What does it mean in layman’s language?

Let me give you an example in today’s scenario. Companies in the United Kingdom collecting contact tracing data, say for pubs and restaurants which today 12 October 2020 have come into force, due to Prime Minister, Boris Johnson’s new guidelines in England on association to stop the spread of Coronavirus, are in a very privileged position.

They are strangely harvesting customer information to sell this data required under Government guidelines, to agents of Big Tech companies.

The funny thing, or as I reckon which is a serious lapse in privacy, is that we are informed that these businesses have clauses allowing them to share information with “third parties,” which we are not privy to at present, with one of these so called “Contact Tracing Agencies” stating openly that it might store customer’s date for up to 25 years.

Other examples of loss of privacy thanks to current tech trends?

Can you imagine how lazy people are that they will hand over their handprints to say Amazon, so they don’t have to take out their pounds and pence from their wallets. 

Amazon wants shoppers to pay with the palm of the handprint stored in the Company’s files.

We are told that this online retail outlet, not fully satisfied with its e-commerce dominance, is now experimenting with the latest “palm of hand payment technology” at two of its cashless convenience stores in Seattle, Washington, USA, shortening lines of queues at its checkout counters.

The  new payment method of “Touch In/Touch Out” with the palm of your hand instead of cash or credit card – a “biometric tracking” poses a host of privacy concerns, including potential targeted hacking.                

Is there any doubt in Anti-Trust enforcement agencies in US and EU wanting to enforce stricter regulation?

The beginning and the end of Power by Big Tech Conglomerates? 

The outsized power of Corporations, or conglomerates, call it what you want, is under review, both in US and in the EU. Whether they can employ the control mechanisms necessary to control or even curb the power of big Tech is in doubt?

What we know at present or even what is anticipated in the near future is  just a list of rules based on the criteria such as the number of users any Big Tech Company has, or at best the market share of revenue generated by these conglomerates.

To monitor Big Tech in all its forms is a daunting task. This makes me ask the imponderable question, would we as the public Users of Big Tech, be burdened to keep our eyes wide open and check intrusion into our privacy, if governments fail to deliver?

Worst case scenario

Staying current with tech trends, keeping your eyes on the future, is not necessarily to know which tech is creeping into our daily lives. It is a necessary part of life and living in today’s Age.

Whether it is navigation maps, streaming, smartphone Apps, Home Personal Assistants, Smart Home Devices, we are seeing many of the Big Tech intrusion into our private lives. We too must hold ourselves as a responsible public.

What is highly likely in the not too distant future is the freedom to be  able to travel the world without our Passports or Identity Documents as we are,as our bio metric details as all on record.  We now have facial recognition, voice recognition, fingerprints, and perhaps “palm hand prints?

Best case scenario  

It is highly likely a best case scenario is that the EU could seek to break up” Big Tech Companies” or monitor their trading of goods, if they are found to be anti-competitive. 

Proposals for the so called “Digital Services Act” may be envisaged, which will seek to place more responsibility on Internet Platforms for policing illegal content on their platforms, as well as the products being sold by or through their Corporate names.

We have a “big haul” ahead of us.

Victor Cherubim