Casting critical eye overseas, way from our Land Like No Other

Susil Premjayantha, Attorney–at-law, who had been in several previous Cabinets, has been relieved of his ministerial post for mentioning to journalists, at the Delkanda fair, that commodities are very expensive due to ‘government policy decisions’. We are sorry about this.

The Minister of Finance promises relief in the way of monetary payments to certain categories. We are perturbed. It would be better to suffer deprivation in the short run and help the government to get the country back to stability. An increase of income by one thousand rupees means paying an additional two thousand for goods bought well within thousand previously. They call it inflation and is caused mainly by money printing.

As always, the editor of the daily, The Island, made a succinct analysis: “A pain reliever with terrible side effects.” Cass knows that only too well, suffering the after effects of a prescribed antibiotic. How stupendously worse it is, when the entire country, barring a few very lucky people, is in for greater suffering. Cass makes no comment.

Nuclear power

Cass was given a fresh insight into nuclear power generation by Gwynne Dyer in The Island of Wednesday, January 5. At midnight on Friday, 31 December, 2021, Germany shut down half of her remaining nuclear power stations. The last three of the original 17 will be shut down on 31 December, 2022. According to Dyer, the burning of fossil fuels adding to the carbon ratio in the atmosphere is far worse than a potential nuclear power plant accident. One remembers only too well Chernobyl in 1986 which killed 28 workers and 15 others. But as Dyer points out, no one died consequent to the Fukushima plant leak. The countries giving up nuclear power generation intend developing, instead renewable resources, but that takes time.

However, most persons fear the installation of nuclear power plants as we did when India was to install such on its southern tip.

Cass finds Dyer a fine columnist, whose articles of geopolitical interest, packed with facts and figures and personal opinion, are most informative. Additionally, they are written in an easy style which makes for interesting reading. Cass googled to find out more about him.

Michael Gwynne Dyer was born in 1943 in the British colony of Newfoundland, which joined Canada in 1949. Hence Dyer is a Canadian. He is a military historian, author, professor, journalist, broadcaster and served in the Navy. He became well known due to his TV series War, in 1983. He lives in London with his second wife, South African, Tina Viljoen, and is a syndicated columnist. An expert on Middle East affairs, he broadened his focus to include climate change and geopolitics. He received his PhD from King’s College London in 1973. We greatly appreciate his articles and comments, and thank The Island for publishing them.

Court cases and verdicts

The US of America has been awash with court cases. On Thursday this week, CNN, which Cass watches, and other media will focus on the first anniversary of the storming of the Capitol by Republican hooligans. Most definitely they were instigated by President Donald Trump, declared the loser in the American presidential election after recounts of votes in many States and endless ranting about the election being rigged. We well remember the speech Trump made that implied force was needed to re-install him as Prez. Consequently, the unprecedented revolt and hundreds of hulking men climbing the outer walls and invading the Capitol and its various rooms. Fortunately, they did not get to the Senate nor were any inside the building injured. But police officers were.

“Three more police officers who responded to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — including two who aided the evacuation of lawmakers — have sued Donald Trump, seeking damages for their physical and emotional injuries.”

A federal appeals court has rejected Trump’s appeal to block a House Committee from accessing White House records related to January 6, 2021. It was reported on BBC and CNN on Tuesday, January 4, that evidence exists to suggest that Ivanka Trump tried to persuade her father to call off the Capitol-invading protesters.

The fact that emerges loud, clear, indisputably and undeniably, is that in the United States of America and many European countries, justice will be meted out; even the highest in the land is not above the law.

Gossipy court cases

The scandalous case against Ghislaine Noelle Marion Maxwell born 1961, has concluded. She was accused by several girls, then teenagers, that she enticed them to prostitute themselves. The allegations were proven and she was sentenced on December 29, 2021 to 65 years in prison.

This is another case of an attractive woman, well born, enticed by wealth and the good life, to do grievous wrong.

She was born in France to a well-to-do family; the father however dabbled in shady business. She attended Balliol College, Oxford, and then became a prominent member of London society.

In 1990 she moved to New York and was involved in a romantic relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. He called her his Main Girlfriend and others named her The Lady of the House. Their friendship lasted 25 years and ended only when Epstein was convicted of trafficking teenagers for sex. He supposedly committed suicide in prison, though whispers circulated that he was ‘eliminated’ for fear of truths, implicating VVIPs, emerging.

Then a 17-year-old spa attendant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Miami, Virginia Giuffre alias Virginia Roberts, was befriended by Maxwell. Soon enough she was in the sex business; who knows whether willingly for money and to meet important persons. Then she brought a case against Epstein and Maxwell for trafficking. Her evidence and those of other teens, now much older, got Maxwell arrested on July 2, 2020 and she was charged by the Federal Government of the US with the crimes of “recruiting and trafficking young girls to be sexually abused by the late American financier Jeffrey Epstein.”

The gold-digging opportunist, Virginia Giuffree, now a plump woman, is not done suing. She has accused Prince Andrew of having sex with her as a teenager. The latest was that his lawyers presented an agreement signed between Giuffre and Epstein and Maxwell for Giuffree to undertake prostitution on payment. The verdict will be given shortly on whether he has to appear in courts in the US or whether his lawyers can represent him. Cass hopes he will be spared the further humiliation at least for the sake of his poor mother, Queen Elizabeth II. Her children, barring the youngest son, have led her through many a trial. One does not need much imagination to share her worry.

Another receiver of ill-gotten gains from an Indian criminal has, we surmise, worried her mother so much that the latter succumbed to a stroke.

So, ends this gossipy column of Cass on the moral dregs of society, though living it up materially. She is still gas cylinder-less, spending through her nose on essentials and totally devoid of consolation. Depression is fought off. But she takes to heart the quote whose author she failed to trace. There are fighters for fair play and what is decent.

The human spirit is indomitable. “Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.”