Category Archives: disaster relief team

Ronaldo’s Magnanimity in Morocco: His Huge Hotel to Service Survivors from Earthquake

The earthquake in the Marrakesh area of Morocco has wrought enormous damage and taken many lives … at least 0000  known cases thus far. The famous Portuguese socccr player, Christiano Ronaldo, happens to be the owner of  huge hotel complex in Marrakesh … ………….. and has immediately made this set of luxury premises available for the  treatment of survivors. Reports thus far indicate that at least 2900 people have died.

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Matilda’s Defeat & Nostradamus in Adelaide

 

SOME IMMEDIATE RESPONSES

“Amazing that Irene also had a premonition that the Matildas would lose 3-1” …..   Ralph Shlomowitz caressing his partner

“Poor Roberts he was asking for it. Shall I organize some Pretzels 🥨 🥨🥨🥨🥨🥨🥨🥨🥨for the Spectators ?” …. Herbert Perera from Deep in Germany

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Huituto Children Survival Skills in the Amazonian Jungle

Victoria Bisset and Ana Vanessa Herrero, in Stuff, 11 June 2023, where the title reads  “Four children were rescued after 40 days in the jungle. How did they survive?”

Four children have survived 40 days in the Amazon jungle in Colombia after their plane crashed last month, killing all three adults on board, including their mother.

 

 

 

 

The wreckage of the Cessna C206 that crashed in the jungle of Solano in the Caqueta state of Colombia

The children, aged 13, 9, 4 and 1, were rescued Friday (local time) after rescuers spent weeks searching for them in remote areas of the jungle, which is home to jaguars, ocelots and venomous snakes.

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Confronting Two Calamities in Eastern Sri Lanka in 2005

Dennis B. McGilvray, in India Review 5(2-3) November 2006, special issue on public anthropology, …. where the title reads  Tsunami and Civil War in Sri Lanka: An Anthropologist Confronts the Real World”  …. with highlighting in different colours imposed by the Editor, Thuppahi

Recent calls for a new “public anthropology” to promote greater visibility for ethnographic research in the eyes of the press and the general public, and to bolster the courage of anthropologists to address urgent issues of the day, are laudable although probably too hopeful as well.  Yet, while public anthropology could certainly be more salient in American life, it already exists in parts of the world such as Sri Lanka where social change, ethnic conflict, and natural catastrophe have unavoidably altered the local context of ethnographic fieldwork.  Much of the anthropology of Sri Lanka in the last three decades would have to count as “public” scholarship, because it has been forced to address the contemporary realities of labor migration, religious politics, the global economy, and the rise of violent ethno-nationalist movements.  As a long-term observer of the Tamil-speaking Hindu and Muslim communities in Sri Lanka’s eastern coastal region, I have always been attracted to the classic anthropological issues of caste, popular religion, and matrilineal kinship.  However, in the wake of the civil wars for Tamil Eelam and the 2004 tsunami disaster, I have been forced to confront (somewhat uneasily) a fundamentally altered fieldwork situation. This gives my current work a stronger flavor of public anthropology, while providing an opportunity for me to trace older matrilocal family patterns and Hindu-Muslim religious traditions under radically changed conditions.

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Sri Lanka’s Central Bank under the Spotlight

Chandrasena Maliyadde, in Daily Ft, 20 July 2022, with this title “Central Bank, its independence and us”

An expert panel discussion on ‘Surviving the Current Economic Crisis: Ex-Central Bankers in Dialogue’ was held in early June. Some speakers stressed that the need of the hour is an independent Central Bank (CBSL). But its relevance or impact on surviving the current economic crisis was not spelt out. Maybe we ignorant laymen could not understand. Perhaps independence may be for the survival of the Central Bank and its officers who spend time in aiconditioned rooms away from the crisis.

Former Central Bank Governors: Nandalal Weerasinghe, Ajith Cabraal &  WD Lakshman

 

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Sharpshooters front-up for Sri Lanka in Crucial Negotiations with IMF

Nandasiri Jasentuliyana,** in Sunday Observer, 24 April 2021,whose preferred title is Steller team of advisors to help seek IMF bailout”

To rescue the country from its march towards a certain disaster, Sri Lanka has appointed a stellar team of world-renowned fiscal and monetary experts to assist in the critical negotiations with the International Monitory Fund (IMF) on the outcome of which may hang the immediate fate of Sri Lanka.

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Dr Susiri Weerasekera: A Sturdy Servant of Humankind

Michael Roberts

In dealing today with the outrageous prejudices displayed by the American political analyst Robert Kaplan in mid-2009, I realised that I should reaffirm the essays devoted to the services to mankind provided by a doctor indomitable and discerning.[1] That medico was Dr. Susiri Weerasekera, who, alas, had deteriorated to a state non compos mentis when I made inquiries at his home in Nugegoda a few years back.

Susiri [with tie] is standing on the extreme left from the viewer’s eyes — this Pix being the Board of Management of the Friend-in-Need Society

Susiri Weerasekera was a person you would want to have alongside you in adversity: a person pragmatic, observant, down-to-earth and relatively unprejudiced. I got to know him when I dropped in on the Friend-in-Need Society in Colombo in 2010 to look into their work in support of the disabled and their speciality in assisting personnel who had lost a limb to obtain and then utilize a prosthetic leg.[2] When I embarked on journeys to the northern reaches Susiri provided me with names and introductions to key personnel in Vavuniya and Jaffna as well as an introduction to Dr Hemantha Herath who was in charge of medical relief for the IDP camps. These recommendations were invaluable.

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Fighting Death and Covid: Mike Ryan of WHO in Straight Talk … and More

Mike Ryan of WHO interviewed by Melissa Fleming

The info-demic can be just as damaging as the pandemic itself, because if people aren’t getting the right information, if they’re not able to trust that information, and then we have a problem. There’s no point having solutions to offer people if they don’t hear about them, or they don’t believe in them,” said Michael (Mike) Ryan in this latest episode.

https://www.un.org/en/awake-at-night/S3-E4-we-need-to-save-more-lives

 

2 January 2019 – A helicopter transports a wounded health worker with their team including Dr. Michael Ryan, Executive Director of the Health Emergencies Programme for WHO (far right) and Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General (second from right). Dr. Ryan helped attend to the health worker, who had been wounded in an attack against the Ebola vaccination team in Komanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Evacuated for advanced care, he later recovered from his injuries – Photo: ©WHO/Lindsay Mackenzie

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Raina, A Lass From Lanka, at Sydney’s Pandemic Frontline

Helen Pitt, in Sydney Morning Herald, May 2020, where the title runs “Professor of Lankan descent now one of world’s top infectious disease specialists”

Professor Raina MacIntyre, one of the world’s leading emerging infectious diseases experts, has barely budged from the bedroom of her Wahroonga home since the outbreak of COVID-19 in Australia.

Raina MacIntyre as a medical student in 1984

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Medical Pontifications from Australia that miss the Mark

 The universe today has been bombarded by medical expertise from every which way pontificating on “solutions” to a covid-pandemic of an extremely complex and varied character. Chandini Liyanagama, a senior Sri Lankan Australian medic, has essayed criticisms of the processes in Sri Lanka on the basis of a webinar broadcast from the island.[1] It is, of course, best to respond to this appraisal on the foundations of the webinar sessions that provoked this assessment.[2] So, I sent it to a few Sri Lankan medicoes within the island for their appraisals.

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