Quote – “International covenant on civil and political rights in force from March 1976 (Part II Article 15.2) of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights” states as follows:

“Nothing in this article shall prejudice the trial and punishment of any person for any act or omission which, at the time when it was committed, was criminal according to the general principles of law recognized by the community of nations”

His Excellency Lee Hsien Loong
Prime Minister of Singapore
PMO – The Istana
Singapore

Your Excellency

We are writing to you today as citizens of a neighbouring country maintaining extremely cordial and friendly relations with Singapore, ever since Singapore was born as a new country.

Our two countries are bonded together as members of the Commonwealth of Nations through the Commonwealth Secretariat and are committed to operate with inter-governmental consensus of the member states of the Commonwealth. We recall and hold with esteem respect and honour our admirations towards the first Prime Minister of Singapore, Late Lee Kuan Yew, as a leading political figure in the region with outstanding achievements, accepted with open doors to any government anywhere in the world. We recollect with gratitude his extremely friendly attitude displayed towards our country throughout the tenure of his office as the Prime Minister.

Your Excellency, a few years ago one of your citizens, (formerly a citizen of Sri Lanka) was invited by our Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, to head a leading government institution of our country. His name is Luxman Arjuna Mahendran and the institution he was invited to head was the Central Bank of Sri Lanka. Arjuna Mahendran was appointed, designated as the Governor of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka in January, 2015.

The Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU), a constituent of the United National Front for Good Governance led by the United National Party (UNP) will not support the 20th Amendment to the Constitution tabled by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), the party’s National Organizer Nishantha Sri Warnasinghe told Colombo Telegraph.


Champika, the JHU leader

The 20th Amendment seeks to abolish the Executive Presidency.

Warnasinghe said that the powers of the executive president were considerably reduced through the 19th Amendment and that since the presidency is now linked with the Parliament and Cabinet, no further amendment was necessary.

‘It is important to note that the JVP did not support Maithripala Sirisena’s presidential bid and did not received a mandate from the majority of the voters to abolish the Executive Presidency,’ Warnasinghe said.


He added that Sirisena’s manifesto clearly stated the intention to obtain a greater degree of democracy by reforming the office of the president, especially by doing away with certain arbitrary powers.

‘This was done through the 19th Amendment,’ he said.

‘We take serious note of the fact that those who advocate the abolishing of the executive presidency are silent on the 13th Amendment, a piece of legislation that makes the executive presidency a must.’

As of now the UNP has not officially stated its position on the 20th Amendment. Neither has the Sri Lanka Freedom Party or the Joint Opposition.

Warnasinghe said that there are certain people who want the executive presidency abolished for the sole reason that they are not confident of winning a presidential election.

Denmark murder trial: A verdict is expected later today in the case of Danish inventor Peter Madsen who is accused of killing Swedish journalist Kim Wall.

Macron in the US: More on his stateside visit, including a speech to US Congress and the latest on the future of the Iran nuclear deal.

Anzac Day: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle commemorate the deaths of soldiers in a ceremony in London.

Toronto van attack: The names and details of victims caught-up in Monday's attack are released.

Alfie Evans: The toddler's parents are due to appeal against a High Court decision today which prevents Alfie from being taken to Italy for treatment. The 23-month-old has a degenerative brain condition for which doctors say there is no cure.

US President Donald Trump told Russia to "get ready" for a missile attack on Syria, despite Moscow urging the White House not to take military action after an alleged chemical attack on the weekend.

"Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart,'" he wrote on Twitter.

Syrian anti-government activists allege a chemical attack in Douma, a rebel-held suburb of Damascus, killed at least 70 people and wounded hundreds more on Saturday.

Trump addressed the Kremlin's alliance with the Syrian government writing: "You shouldn’t be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!"

The Syrian government denies it is behind the attack.

Russia on Tuesday urged the US to avoid taking military action in response to the attack in Syria.

"I would once again beseech you to refrain from the plans that you're currently developing," said Vasily Nebenzia, Moscow's UN envoy.

Washington would "bear responsibility" for any "illegal military adventure" it carried out, he added.

Trump later tweeted that the US' relationship with "Russia is worse now than it has ever been, and that includes the Cold War," telling Moscow to "stop the arms race".

LONDON — It was a black Monday for Russian oligarchs as up to $16 billion was wiped off the value of the country's wealthiest tycoons' holdings in the wake of U.S.-imposed sanctions.

The ruble fell to its lowest level against the dollar since late 2016, while shares in sanctioned aluminum producer Rusal, which is controlled by the billionaire Oleg Deripaska, plunged more than 50 percent on the Hong Kong stock exchange.

As Russian stocks tumbled, the Kremlin reportedly said it would step in to support affected companies.

The latest sanctions were announced by President Donald Trump on Friday. They target leading figures close to President Vladimir Putin in an aggressive response to alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

Bloomberg reported that all but one of the 27 Russian tycoons on its Bloomberg Billionaires Index lost money on Monday. The biggest loser, it said, was nickel miner Vladimir Potanin, whose wealth fell by $2.25 billion.

In total, the net worth of Russia's wealthiest people fell by $16 billion, according to Bloomberg. Forbes Russia said the value of tycoons on its own index fell by $12 billion.

Shares in Sberbank, one of Russia's biggest banks and a barometer of its economic health, fell 17.3 percent.

However, some Russian business leaders remained upbeat. "I lost $250 million in one day," Oleg Tinkov, founder and chair of the board of directors of Tinkoff Bank, told a business conference in Moscow on Tuesday. "But there have been worse days when I've lost $1 billion in a day. So, actually, it was a very positive day."

Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Kremlin would back efforts to mitigate the effect of the sanctions package, which he called "egregious in its lawlessness."

"Time is needed for analysis to understand the size of the real damage and to work out steps to correct the situation, for the maximum possible correction," he said Monday.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev ordered officials to draw up measures to support sanctioned companies in the energy, metals and arms sectors, Russian news agencies reported.

Late last week, the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) confirmed 30 organisations, including Facebook, were being investigated as part of a national inquiry into the use of personal data and analytics for political and commercial purposes.

It came weeks after the regulatory body was granted a warrant to search Cambridge Analytica’s (CA) headquarters in London, the political consulting firm at the heart of the data leak scandal.

But how were they able to access and harness Facebook users’ data for their political partners and clients, and how will that impact people going forward?

This Is Your Digital Life
CA’s mass data-mining project began in June 2014, when, according to its co-founder Christopher Wylie, a commercial data-sharing deal was signed between SCL Elections (CA’s parent company) and Global Science Research (GSR), an organisation owned by Cambridge University lecturer Aleksandr Kogan.

The psychology professor created a quiz app called This Is Your Digital Life, with which data would be extracted from personality tests taken by its users and given to CA. The firm then advertised the app on an Amazon web service and paid participants up to $5 to encourage take-up, but only US voters with a Facebook account were eligible to take part. Their responses were then paired with information taken from their social media profile, including their gender, age, relationship status, location and ‘likes’, to establish their personality traits and political views.

Within months, around 320,000 Facebook users had downloaded the app, exposing both their profiles and those belonging to their Facebook Friends – around 87 million in total – as the social network allowed apps to retrieve such data at the time.

Those individuals were then linked to electoral records obtained by SCL, and targeted with highly personalized political advertising for CA’s partners and clients.

President Trump and Brexit
CEO Alexander Nix has previously said CA was a major player in Donald Trump’s election in 2016, telling undercover reporters that the company “ran all the digital campaign” for the Republican candidate.

The company also received payments totaling almost $6 million from Trump’s campaign team in 2016, according to government records, yet they have since vehemently downplayed CA’s role in their success.

In a statement released in October, campaign director Michael Glassner said data analysis was managed solely by the Republican National Committee and “any claims that voter data from any other source played a key role in the victory are false”.

It starts with an eight o’clock morning Mass at the 17th century baroque Carmelite Church, located next to the Presidential Palace in the heart of Warsaw, to commemorate the tragic death of his twin brother in a plane crash in Russia’s city of Smolensk on April 10, 2010.

The presidential delegation with Lech Kaczyński and 95 top politicians and military elite on board was on its way to attend the anniversary of the 1940 massacre of thousands of Polish officers by Josef Stalin's secret police during World War II in Katyn forest, near Smolensk.

In the evening Jarosław Kaczyński, surrounded by top ministers and hundreds of mostly pensioners holding birch crosses and framed pictures of his twin brother and his wife, attends a second Mass followed by a Rosary procession to the Presidential Palace where he climbs up a small stepladder to give an emotional speech.

Police block the surrounding streets to ensure the event can pass without interruption.

Victims of the disaster have been honoured alongside World War II heroes in speeches and on monuments. Every month for years, Kaczyński assured the crowd that he would soon be able to reveal the truth behind the presidential plane crash and pledged that those responsible would be held accountable.

The theories
Two official investigations conducted by both Russia and Poland — under its previous Civic Platform government — concluded that the catastrophe was an accident caused by pilot errors attempting to land the Soviet-era Tupolev Tu-154 plane at an airfield covered in heavy fog that lowered the visibility below the minimum required standard.

Additionally, the Polish commission blamed the Russian air traffic controllers for providing pilots with incorrect landing instructions, which made them believe that they were on the right course to land.

At a fiery election rally in Budapest last month, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban — who seems set to extend his rule after Hungarians go to the polls on Sunday — launched into the latest in a long line of attacks on what has become his favorite foe: the Hungarian-American businessman George Soros.

"We are fighting an enemy that is different from us," Orban was reported to have said. "Not open, but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world."

Orban's rhetoric — anti-immigrant and, as many critics have argued, anti-Semitic — would have been consigned to the fringes of Europe's far-right just a few years ago.

Yet in a sign of how mainstream these once-taboo views have again become in parts of the continent, such language is now commonplace for the leader, whose country is a U.S. ally and a member of the European Union and NATO.

With Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman in France on the start of a European tour, protestors in Paris have been demonstrating for an end to Saudi Arabian air strikes in Yemen - where Riyadh is leading a military coalition against Iran backed Houthi rebels.

Emmanuel Macron will meet the Crown Prince on Tuesday. The French President is under growing domestic pressure over arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

Ten human rights organisations also want him to insist the kingdom lift a blockade that's aggravating the humanitarian crisis in Yemen. The United Nations says 10,000 people have died in the fighting in the Yemen conflict.

Syrian state TV reported multiple casualties in what it said was a suspected US missile attack on a military airport in the early hours of Monday.

Washington denied any involvement in the strikes on Tiyas airbase, located near Homs, which is a main base for Iranian-backed militias.

The strike comes amid international outrage over a purported chemical weapons attack in Douma, East Ghouta, on Saturday which left 70 people dead, including children.

The White House issued an official statement on Sunday condemning the attack and saying it would issue a "strong joint response" to the attack with France.

Your Facebook account probably has way more apps linked to it than you think. And this is a big deal, since some apps allow location tracking while others upload your phone contacts and even photos.

To revoke app permissions, follow these steps on your Facebook page:

• Go to "account settings."
• Click "apps" on the left-hand sidebar.
• Click the "X" on the right of each app to revoke access to your data.
• Confirm "remove" when the window prompts you to do so.
• You can also disable Facebook's "platform" feature, which stops Facebook from integrating with games and other apps for login purposes in the future.

A new harassment lawsuit against actor Fred Savage was announced on Wednesday.

Attorney Anahita Sedaghatfar of The Cochran Firm said the suit alleges gender harassment, assault, battery and gender discrimination.

Set costumer YoungJoo Hwang was employed with 20th Century Fox in 2015 for the show "The Grinder," in which Savage starred.
Hwang said she was in charge of setting up and maintaining the actor's outfits during the show. She explained that he was aggressive toward her on many occasions.

"He would routine curse at me, yell at me, demean me, when all I was trying to do was my job," Hwang said.

She said the alleged abuse from Savage made it stressful for her to go to work and added that she's "not the only woman that Savage targeted."

"There were others, and this was well known on set," Hwang said.

She detailed one specific encounter in which she attempted to brush off dandruff from the actor's jacket.

"Mr. Savage snapped. He yelled at me, told me not to touch him, and he hit my arm violently three times," Hwang said.

She added that she cried from the humiliation and pain. She said that moment was the "last straw because my physical safety was at risk."

Hwang said she reported the incident to her superiors but rather than taking action, she said, they encouraged her not to report Savage's conduct because people would lose their jobs and she would never work in the industry again.

"My complaints were ignored, the violence perpetrated against me was ignored, and I was made to feel as if I had done something wrong - that I was to blame and that I should just keep my mouth shut," Hwang said.

The costumer was moved to another show and Savage continued to work on "The Grinder."

"It took everything I had in me to be here to today and to speak out," Hwang said. "I was inspired by the #MeToo movement and the women before me and encourage other women to come forward and speak their truth."

Sedaghatfar said the complaint was filed Wednesday morning against Savage and 20th Century Fox.

Sedaghatfar claimed the company has done nothing to "remedy or prevent Mr. Savage's harassment, his bullying, his intimidation and his battery."

The company released a statement, saying they found no evidence of wrongdoing by Savage.

"Fox takes all allegations of improper conduct very seriously. We conducted a thorough investigation into these allegations and found no evidence of any wrongdoing on the part of Mr. Savage. We will vigorously defend against these unfounded claims."


Savage said in a lengthy statement that the accusations by Hwang are "completely without merit and absolutely untrue."