Colombo (LNW): The national fuel ID QR code system approved for purchasing fuel has now been quashed, as per a latest government decision.
Accordingly, the QR code system for fuel purchases will be revoked from today (01) said Energy Minister Kanchana Wijesekara.
Colombo (LNW): SINOPEC the newly established Chinese energy solutions company in Sri Lanka has announced its new fuel prices this (01) morning:
The SINOPEC fuel prices for petrol and diesel stand about Rs. 3 below than that of the other two fuel companies in Sri Lanka.
Colombo (LNW): Matara Branch of Sri Lanka Red Cross Society is set to launch its sixth medical clinic at Kotapola Waralla Junior School in Matara this Sunday (03).
The clinic will operate full day providing free medical services for diabetes, high blood pressure and all other diseases, and will also provide free medical tests, treatments and medication, Red Cross said in a statement.
Persons requiring further treatments will also be referred to the main hospitals that day, the Society added.
Colombo (LNW): Teh Sri Lankan Rupee has further appreciated against the US Dollar at leading commercial banks in the country today (01) in comparison to the day before.
Accordingly, Peoples Bank reveals that the buying price of the US Dollar has dropped to Rs. 311.42 from Rs. 312.88, and the selling price to Rs. 326.05 from Rs. 327.58.
At Commercial Bank, the buying and selling prices of the US Dollar remain unchanged at Rs. 313.72 and Rs. 326, respectively.
At Sampath Bank, the buying price of the US Dollar has dropped to Rs. 312 from Rs. 314, and the selling price to Rs. 323 from Rs. 325.
By: Staff Writer
Colombo (LNW): The government has extended a date for pension funds and the Employees Provident Funds to exchange Treasury bonds to September 11 following a delay in enacting a penal interest rate for superannuation funds along with the pending Supreme Court case.
A legal amendment to change the Inland Revenue Act to charge 30 percent tax from superannuation funds instead of the current 14 percent, has been delayed amid the legal challenge.
Placing the entire burden of domestic debt restructuring on ‘captive’ institutions — the Central Bank and the EPF, which is managed by the monetary board— is an easy option for the government, eminent economic experts claimed.
But the favoured treatment of commercial banks and domestic government security holders compared to the EPF is an inequitable distribution of the burden of debt restructuring, they added.
Two bonds (9.00 percent 01 Sept 2023 and 11.20 percent 01 September 2023 bond) would be excluded from the list of eligible bonds as they will mature before the offer date. The bonds would also be excluded from the offers that had been accepted.
The participation threshold for 1 October 2023 (7.00-pct), 15 November 2023 (6.3 -pct) and 15 December 2023 (11.6-pct) would be changed to 50 percent.
The participation threshold for 1 October 2023 (7.00-pct), 15 November 2023 (6.3 -pct) and 15 December 2023 (11.6-pct) would be changed to 50 percent.
The present government’s income tax policy to attract an effective tax rate of 30% would require a salary above Rs. 500,000 per month. Probably 90% of the working population draws less than 500,000 per month, economic analysts said.
This government is now amending the income tax laws to impose a 30% income tax on EPF/ETF.
This tax will apply on all of EPF/ETF income without any tax relief. Therefore, even an employee earning a monthly salary of Rs. 30,000 will be liable to bear the tax of 30% on their savings on EPF/ETF.
The present government’s income tax policy to attract an effective tax rate of 30% would require a salary above Rs. 500,000 per month. Probably 90% of the working population draws less than 500,000 per month.
This government is now amending the income tax laws to impose a 30% income tax on EPF/ETF. This tax will apply on all of EPF/ETF income without any tax relief.
Therefore, even an employee earning a monthly salary of Rs. 30,000 will be liable to bear the tax of 30% on their savings on EPF/ETF.
At the end of 25 – 30 years of employment, the EPF holder bears an accumulated reserve with low interest. It is estimated that the monthly return will cover between 20% – 35% of an individual’s cost of living in retirement. Proposed 30% tax on EPF will further reduce income.
‘Is this justified against low income workers?’ asked SJB, Parliamentarian Eran Wickramaratne issuing a special statement. Foreigners invest in bonds of small countries looking for more income, absorbing the risk factor. Having already profited from the high interest/income, restructuring of said loans does not bear significant consequences to the investors, he added.
Bill dengler is trying to become an Italian citizen. He has all the documents ready to go. But Mr Dengler, an American software engineer who was born fully blind, cannot make an appointment with the Italian consulate in San Francisco. Its booking system uses a colour-based calendar, which is not legible to his screen reader, a device that delivers a website’s content in audio form. And, perhaps because slots fill rapidly, rules prohibit him from hiring someone to make the appointment on his behalf.
What are Mr Dengler’s options? This being America, he could, of course, sue. The government largely relies on private citizens and their obliging lawyers to enforce the Americans with Disabilities Act (ada), the federal law passed 33 years ago to protect the civil rights of disabled people. This deputisation has resulted in tonnes of litigation, some of which has done more for lawyers than for disabled people. In the past five years, website-accessibility lawsuits have surged to comprise about a fifth of such claims. According to Usablenet, a company that both tracks litigation and sells services to help clients prevent it, plaintiffs have filed more than 16,700 digital-accessibility lawsuits in state and federal court since 2018.
The ada only permits plaintiffs to recover attorneys’ fees. But New York and California, where the vast majority of cases are brought, allow plaintiffs to tack on state-level claims to their federal cases and sue for damages. The financial incentives for both plaintiffs and lawyers are hard to ignore. “I think that this was a gravy train that people jumped on,” says David Stein, who defends businesses. The country’s most active law firm, according to Usablenet, appears to have been founded in 2020; the fourth-most-prolific opened in 2021. Serial plaintiffs abound. In a single month in 2018 a blind man in Queens filed 43 lawsuits. In the year from January 2022, six people, represented by one law firm, brought 435 suits. The most active plaintiffs in 2021 and 2022 filed over 100 lawsuits each, according to Accessibility.com, which also tracks litigation.
While the ada orders businesses to add wheelchair ramps, it has never set out precisely how they should design their websites—it simply mandates “effective communication”. Nearly 5% of America’s population is blind or has low vision (uncorrectable with glasses). Making the web broadly usable was always the goal: at the First International World Wide Web conference in 1994, Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the internet, called upon pioneers to prioritise “this feeling that the web is totally accessible to everybody”.
By 1995 a group of organisations started what eventually became the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. These are now about 50 technical recommendations, regularly updated, that prescribe minimum standards for colour contrast, keyboard operability (visually impaired people use the tab key, rather than a mouse) and alt-text (written descriptions of images). They have not been adopted by the ada, but are frequently cited in plaintiffs’ lawsuits.
Some of those standards meaningfully ease the burden on disabled site-goers; others are less critical. But the lawsuits tend not to differentiate. Complaints can hinge on “technical non-conformance”, says Kris Rivenburgh, founder of ADAcompliance.net. Since virtually all settle before they reach trial, judges rarely weigh in on whether they created a barrier to access.
On occasion, the Department of Justice (doj) has intervened directly. It brought enforcement actions, for example, against pharmacy giants Rite Aid and Kroger for—recalling Mr Dengler’s consulate conundrum—creating inaccessible covid-19 vaccine portals. The private lawsuits, meanwhile, tend to target smaller companies reporting annual revenue under $25m; and most are retailers, not purveyors of education or health-care services.
The spectre of litigation may help push up standards. But Jeffrey Gottlieb, a plaintiffs’ attorney in New York, frankly admits he is not so sure that litigation has had a broader “deterrent effect”. Others speculate that the lawsuits have even stymied progress, “causing corporations to throw up their arms and say I’m going to get sued anyway”, as Mr Stein puts it. Jason Taylor, the head of innovation at Usablenet, argues that the profusion of lawsuits can indeed take credit for “significantly” improving accessibility. Still, he admits, “to be on the cynical side”, large companies may believe that settling lawsuits is “cheap compared to doing it the right way”.
The wrong way is with overlays, plug-ins that show customisable website interfaces to disabled users, promising to help companies achieve accessibility without overhauling code. These interfaces often interfere with the technology blind people already use, and they do not prevent litigation: Usablenet reports that over 400 companies using overlays were hit with lawsuits in the first half of 2023. Experts say there is no substitute for auditing sites, designing fixes and manually testing them.
Two things could curb lawsuits, says Rob Thorpe, a defence attorney. Plaintiffs could be required to issue notice, providing the offending business the chance to fix the problem before suing. The other would be for the doj to give more clarity on the requirements for websites, a move that seemingly everyone supports. Both have the advantage of benefiting the real parties on either side, rather than those profiting from the confusion.
THE ECONOMIST
Politics is supposed to be about persuasion; but it has always been stalked by propaganda. Campaigners dissemble, exaggerate and fib. They transmit lies, ranging from bald-faced to white, through whatever means are available. Anti-vaccine conspiracies were once propagated through pamphlets instead of podcasts. A century before covid-19, anti-maskers in the era of Spanish flu waged a disinformation campaign. They sent fake messages from the surgeon-general via telegram (the wires, not the smartphone app). Because people are not angels, elections have never been free from falsehoods and mistaken beliefs.
But as the world contemplates a series of votes in 2024, something new is causing a lot of worry. In the past, disinformation has always been created by humans. Advances in generative artificial intelligence (ai)—with models that can spit out sophisticated essays and create realistic images from text prompts—make synthetic propaganda possible. The fear is that disinformation campaigns may be supercharged in 2024, just as countries with a collective population of some 4bn—including America, Britain, India, Indonesia, Mexico and Taiwan—prepare to vote. How worried should their citizens be?
It is important to be precise about what generative-ai tools like Chatgpt do and do not change. Before they came along, disinformation was already a problem in democracies. The corrosive idea that America’s presidential election in 2020 was rigged brought rioters to the Capitol on January 6th—but it was spread by Donald Trump, Republican elites and conservative mass-media outlets using conventional means. Activists for the bjp in India spread rumours via WhatsApp threads. Propagandists for the Chinese Communist Party transmit talking points to Taiwan through seemingly legitimate news outfits. All of this is done without using generative-ai tools.
What could large-language models change in 2024? One thing is the quantity of disinformation: if the volume of nonsense were multiplied by 1,000 or 100,000, it might persuade people to vote differently. A second concerns quality. Hyper-realistic deepfakes could sway voters before false audio, photos and videos could be debunked. A third is microtargeting. With ai, voters may be inundated with highly personalised propaganda at scale. Networks of propaganda bots could be made harder to detect than existing disinformation efforts are. Voters’ trust in their fellow citizens, which in America has been declining for decades, may well suffer as people began to doubt everything.
This is worrying, but there are reasons to believe ai is not about to wreck humanity’s 2,500-year-old experiment with democracy. Many people think that others are more gullible than they themselves are. In fact, voters are hard to persuade, especially on salient political issues such as whom they want to be president. (Ask yourself what deepfake would change your choice between Joe Biden and Mr Trump.) The multi-billion-dollar campaign industry in America that uses humans to persuade voters can generate only minute changes in their behaviour.
Tools to produce believable fake images and text have existed for decades. Although generative ai might be a labour-saving technology for internet troll farms, it is not clear that effort was the binding constraint in the production of disinformation. New image-generation algorithms are impressive, but without tuning and human judgment they are still prone to produce pictures of people with six fingers on each hand, making the possibility of personalised deepfakes remote for the time being. Even if these ai-augmented tactics were to prove effective, they would soon be adopted by many interested parties: the cumulative effect of these influence operations would be to make social networks even more cacophonous and unusable. It is hard to prove that mistrust translates into a systematic advantage for one party over the other.
Social-media platforms, where misinformation spreads, and ai firms say they are focused on the risks. Openai, the company behind Chatgpt, says it will monitor usage to try to detect political-influence operations. Big-tech platforms, criticised both for propagating disinformation in the 2016 election and taking down too much in 2020, have become better at identifying suspicious accounts (though they have become loth to arbitrate the truthfulness of content generated by real people). Alphabet and Meta ban the use of manipulated media in political advertising and say they are quick to respond to deepfakes. Other companies are trying to craft a technological standard establishing the provenance of real images and videos.
Voluntary regulation has limits, however, and the involuntary sort poses risks. Open-source models, like Meta’s Llama, which generates text, and Stable Diffusion, which makes images, can be used without oversight. And not all platforms are created equal—TikTok, the video-sharing social-media company, has ties to China’s government, and the app is designed to promote virality from any source, including new accounts. Twitter (which is now called X) cut its oversight team after it was bought by Elon Musk, and the platform is a haven for bots. The agency regulating elections in America is considering a disclosure requirement for campaigns using synthetically generated images. This is sensible, though malicious actors will not comply with it. Some in America are calling for a Chinese-style system of extreme regulation. There, ai algorithms must be registered with a government body and somehow embody core socialist values. Such heavy-handed control would erode the advantage America has in ai innovation.
Technological determinism, which pins all the foibles of people on the tools they use, is tempting. But it is also wrong. Although it is important to be mindful of the potential of generative ai to disrupt democracies, panic is unwarranted. Before the technological advances of the past two years, people were quite capable of transmitting all manner of destructive and terrible ideas to one another. The American presidential campaign of 2024 will be marred by disinformation about the rule of law and the integrity of elections. But its progenitor will not be something newfangled like Chatgpt. It will be Mr Trump.
THE ECONOMIST
By: Staff Writer
Colombo (LNW): Hundreds of trade unionists and civil society activists stage protest demonstrations in Colombo this week demanding the Central Bank to totally exempt the superannuation funds from the so called Domestic Debt optimization programme.
The Trade Union and Civil Society collective one of the group of conveners of the protest has urged the CB authorities to provide them an opportunity to discuss the attempt to destroy Employees Provident fund (EPF) and Employees Trust Fund (ETF) as it was life time savings of the working public but not investment funds.
But the Central Bank has evaded the important discussion giving reasons unbecoming for the country’s monetary authority responsible for the people, they claimed.
However in a media communique, the CB stated that the opportunity was missed by the said group of persons to get their concerns clarified on DDO, the manner in which the member contributions will be guaranteed through the implementation of DDO and as to how an investment return at a minimum.
Clarifying, the demand of protesters, leading member of the Unite organization Danusha Pathirana noted that their intention was to bring to the notice of the CB to fulfill five key demands without touching the EPF and ETF funds.
He said that the state can size the savings and fixed deposits of high networth tax defaulters while cut down their bond repayments equivalent to to their massive tax evasion money amounting to RS 904 billion by 2023 according Inland Revenue department data.
Such bond holders are getting high interest rates for their investments and therefore the present value of the tax evasion money would be around Rs 2 billion by now.
The government would be able to save three times of the amount expected from the restructure of EPF and ETF by this massive tax recovery process and seizing the saving and fixed deposit accounts of tax evaders, he pointed out.
They also suggested to conduct a forensic audit to bring down US$ 53 billion plundered by Sri Lanka’s businesses involved in the exports and imports trade.
They have plundered US$ 36.833 billion (Rs 13.246 trillion) over nine years through intentional, dodgy invoicing, and stashing the foreign exchange earnings offshore.
Importers and exporters intentionally falsify the declared value of goods on invoices filed with Sri Lanka Customs, to make an average of US$ 4.093 billion (Rs 1.471 trillion) evaporate every year, an extensive investigation by Washington, DC-based Global Financial Integrity has revealed.
The disparity in the Sri Lanka project loan disbursement and utilisation has been uncovered in recent government audit findings raising the credibility of state accounting procedure.
Sri Lanka has been taken project loans amounting Rs 8 trillion since 2015 but the country has assets worth Rs. 2 trillion in accordance with financial statements, Auditor General W. P. C. Wickramaratne revealed adding that Rs 6 trillion is missing from those assets.
The finance ministry should call for a forensic audit on this matter and recover the money from perpetrators instead of trying to restructure the EPF and ETF, Mr Pathirana added while demanding the government to abolish all tax exemptions given to BOI companies.
High Commission of India, Colombo commemorated 50 years of association between National Defence College (NDC), India and Sri Lankan Armed Forces on 28 Aug 2023. The event celebrated the enduring bonds of cooperation, camaraderie and friendship among the militaries of the two countries. Secretary of Defence Gen Kamal Gunaratne(Retd) was the Chief Guest of the event. Chief of Defence Staff Lt. Gen Shavendra Silva, Commanders of Sri Lanka Army, Navy and Air Force along with officers from NDC, India and dignitaries from Ministry of Defence attended the event.
2. Gen Kamal Gunaratne(Retd) along with High Commissioner of India H.E Gopal Baglay felicitated the Guest of Honour, Admiral DB Goonesekara(Retd) on the special occasion. Admiral Goonesekara has the distinction of being the first NDC India alumni in Sri Lanka. Accepting the felicitations, he shared his cherished experiences from the times he spent at NDC, India in 1972, more than 50 years ago.
3. High Commissioner HE Gopal Baglay highlighted at the event that India stands committed to Sri Lanka’s capacity building endeavours in line with India’s ‘Neighbourhood First Policy’. He emphasized that training engagements between the Armed Forces have instilled a spirit of brotherhood and interoperability amongst the services and form the foundation of their strong bonds.
4. Addressing the gathering, Secretary Defence commended the efforts of the High Commissioner to bridge the bonds between the two nations across various dimensions. He underlined that India has always been a pillar of strength in training of Sri Lankan Armed forces personnel and shares strong cultural, demographical and behavioral similarities as a friendly neighbour. He further expressed his gratitude for the fully funded and comprehensive training opportunities being provided to Sri Lanka Armed Forces.
5. The event was attended by close to 50 NDC India alumni in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka Armed Forces officers constitute around 10% of the total capacity building vacancies allocated to officers from foreign countries, making such allocation the largest.
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Colombo
29 August 2023
