Watchdog (research Collective)
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Watchdog (research Collective)
Watchdog is a Sri Lankan research collective founded in April 2019. It maintains a fact-checking website and makes use of open-source intelligence (OSINT) methods. History Watchdog was founded on 23 April 2019, two days after the Easter bombings occurred, by local startup mogul Bhanuka Harischandra, together with Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Nisal Periyapperuma, Ragulan Ketheeswaran and Safra Anver. Within 36 hours, the team had created a fact-checking app. Watchdog debunked misinformation that spread in the aftermath of the bombings, including a false claim that the water supply of the Hunipitiya region in Colombo had been poisoned by Muslims. As the amount of misinformation was increasing significantly, Watchdog increased the scale of its operations, with Ketheeswaran recruiting volunteers to translate fact-checks to Sinhala and Tamil. Within 90 days, 25 to 30 volunteers were working for the group. At the time, the website and app had almost 52,000 users. In January 2020, Anve ...
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Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka (, ; si, ශ්‍රී ලංකා, Śrī Laṅkā, translit-std=ISO (); ta, இலங்கை, Ilaṅkai, translit-std=ISO ()), formerly known as Ceylon and officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, is an island country in South Asia. It lies in the Indian Ocean, southwest of the Bay of Bengal, and southeast of the Arabian Sea; it is separated from the Indian subcontinent by the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait. Sri Lanka shares a maritime border with India and Maldives. Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte is its legislative capital, and Colombo is its largest city and financial centre. Sri Lanka has a population of around 22 million (2020) and is a multinational state, home to diverse cultures, languages, and ethnicities. The Sinhalese are the majority of the nation's population. The Tamils, who are a large minority group, have also played an influential role in the island's history. Other long established groups include the Moors, the Burghers ...
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Sabbatical
A sabbatical (from the Hebrew: (i.e., Sabbath); in Latin ; Greek: ) is a rest or break from work. The concept of the sabbatical is based on the Biblical practice of ''shmita'' (sabbatical year), which is related to agriculture. According to , Jews in the Land of Israel must take a year-long break from working the fields every seven years. Starting with Harvard University in 1880, many universities and other institutional employers of scientists, physicians, and academics offer the opportunity to qualify for paid sabbatical as an employee benefit, called ''sabbatical leave''. Early academic sabbatical policies were designed to aid their faculty in resting and recovering, but were also provided in order to facilitate "advancements in knowledge in vogue elsewhere...an intellectual and practical necessity" for both the professors and university education more broadly. Present day academic sabbaticals typically excuse the grantee from day to day teaching and departmental duties, t ...
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Fact-checking Websites
This list of fact-checking websites includes websites that provide fact-checking services about both political and non-political subjects. The Reporters' Lab at Duke University maintains a database of fact-checking organizations that is managed by Mark Stencel and Bill Adair. The database tracks more than 100 non-partisan organizations around the world. The Lab's inclusion criteria are based on whether the organization By region Africa * Africa Check Africa Check is a non-profit fact checking organisation set up in 2012 to promote accuracy in public debate and the media in Africa. The organisation's goal is to raise the quality of information available to society across the continent. Africa ...: Africa's first independent fact-checking organization with offices in Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Senegal and the UK checking claims made by public figures and the media in Africa. * News Verifier Africa: one-stop fact-checking and news verification platform for Africans. T ...
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List Of Fact-checking Websites
This list of fact-checking websites includes websites that provide fact-checking services about both political and non-political subjects. The Reporters' Lab at Duke University maintains a database of fact-checking organizations that is managed by Mark Stencel and Bill Adair. The database tracks more than 100 non-partisan organizations around the world. The Lab's inclusion criteria are based on whether the organization By region Africa * Africa Check: Africa's first independent fact-checking organization with offices in Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Senegal and the UK checking claims made by public figures and the media in Africa. * News Verifier Africa: one-stop fact-checking and news verification platform for Africans. The non-profit platform seeks to improve public access to accurate information by simplifying fact-checking and creating varied appealing formats for fact checked news, data and viral images. FactCheckHub This is the verification platform of the Internati ...
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Mahinda Rajapaksa
Mahinda Rajapaksa ( si, මහින්ද රාජපක්ෂ, ta, மஹிந்த ராஜபக்ஷ; born Percy Mahendra Rajapaksa; 18 November 1945) is a Sri Lankan politician. He served as the President of Sri Lanka from 2005 to 2015; the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka from 2004 to 2005, 2018, and 2019 to 2022; the Leader of the Opposition from 2002 to 2004 and 2018 to 2019, and the Minister of Finance from 2005 to 2015 and 2019 to 2021. He has been a Member of Parliament (MP) for Kurunegala since 2015. Rajapaksa is a lawyer by profession and was first elected to the Parliament of Sri Lanka in 1970. He served as the leader of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party from 2005 to 2015. Rajapaksa was sworn in for his first six-year term as president on 19 November 2005. He was subsequently re-elected in 2010 for a second term. Rajapaksa was defeated in his bid for a third term in the 2015 presidential election by Maithripala Sirisena, and he left office on 9 January 2015. L ...
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Prime Minister Of Sri Lanka
The Prime Minister of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka is the head and most senior member of parliament in the cabinet of ministers. It is the second-most powerful position in Sri Lanka's executive branch behind the president, who is the constitutional chief executive. The Cabinet is collectively held accountable to parliament for their policies and actions. Dinesh Gunawardena has been prime minister since 22 July, after Ranil Wickremesinghe was sworn in as the President. Appointment The president will appoint a member of parliament as prime minister, who in the president's opinion, "is most likely to command the confidence of Parliament". The prime minister holds office throughout the period during which the cabinet of ministers continues to function under the provisions of the constitution unless the prime minister resigns from the post or ceases to be a member of parliament. Powers and role Under the Soulbury Constitution the post of Prime Minister was create ...
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Daily Mirror (Sri Lanka)
''Daily Mirror'' is a daily English-language newspaper published in Colombo, Sri Lanka, by Wijeya Newspapers. Its Sunday counterpart is the ''Sunday Times''. Its sister newspaper on financial issues is the ''Daily FT''. Daily supplements ;Mondays through Saturdays *''Mirror Business'' *''Life'' ;Tuesdays *''W@W – Women at work'' ;Thursdays *''Junior Mirror'' See also *''Lankadeepa'', Sinhala-language sister newspaper *''Tamil Mirror'', Tamil-language Tamil (; ' , ) is a Dravidian language natively spoken by the Tamil people of South Asia. Tamil is an official language of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, the sovereign nations of Sri Lanka and Singapore, and the Indian territory of Pud ... sister newspaper Notes External links * - Daily Mirror Daily newspapers published in Sri Lanka English-language newspapers published in Sri Lanka Publications established in 1999 Wijeya Newspapers Mass media in Colombo {{SriLanka-newspaper-stub ...
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2022 Sri Lankan Protests
The 2022 Sri Lankan protests ( si, අරගලය, translit=Aragalaya, lit=Struggle), are mass protests that began in March 2022 against the government of Sri Lanka. The government has been criticized for mismanaging the Sri Lankan economy, which led to a subsequent economic crisis involving severe inflation, daily blackouts, a shortage of fuel, domestic gas, and other essential goods. The main demand of the protesters has been the resignation of Gotabaya Rajapaksa and key officials from the Rajapaksa family. Despite the involvement of several opposition parties, most protesters have considered themselves to be apolitical, and some have expressed discontent with the parliamentary opposition. During the protests, protesters have chanted slogans such as "go home Gota" and "go home Rajapaksas". The protests have been mainly caused by the general public, with youths playing a major part by carrying out protests at Galle Face Green. The government has reacted to these protests w ...
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Reuters
Reuters ( ) is a news agency owned by Thomson Reuters Corporation. It employs around 2,500 journalists and 600 photojournalists in about 200 locations worldwide. Reuters is one of the largest news agencies in the world. The agency was established in London in 1851 by the German-born Paul Reuter. It was acquired by the Thomson Corporation of Canada in 2008 and now makes up the media division of Thomson Reuters. History 19th century Paul Reuter worked at a book-publishing firm in Berlin and was involved in distributing radical pamphlets at the beginning of the Revolutions in 1848. These publications brought much attention to Reuter, who in 1850 developed a prototype news service in Aachen using homing pigeons and electric telegraphy from 1851 on, in order to transmit messages between Brussels and Aachen, in what today is Aachen's Reuters House. Reuter moved to London in 1851 and established a news wire agency at the London Royal Exchange. Headquartered in London, Reuter' ...
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Organized Crime And Corruption Reporting Project
The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) is a global network of investigative journalists with staff on six continents. It was founded in 2006 and specializes in organized crime and corruption. It publishes its stories through local media and in English and Russian through its website. OCCRP works with and supports 50+ independent media outlets in Europe, Africa, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. In 2017, NGO Advisor ranked it 69th in the world in their annual list of the 500 best non-governmental organizations (NGO). History OCCRP was founded by veteran journalists Drew Sullivan and Paul Radu. Sullivan was serving as the editor of the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) and Radu worked with an early Romanian center. The team paired with colleagues in the region on a story looking at energy traders. The project showed traders were buying power at below production rates while the public was paying increasingly higher fees. In 2007 the project won the first ev ...
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Bellingcat
Bellingcat (stylised as bellngcat) is a Netherlands-based investigative journalism group that specialises in fact-checking and open-source intelligence (OSINT). It was founded by British journalist and former blogger Eliot Higgins in July 2014. Bellingcat publishes the findings of both professional and citizen journalist investigations into war zones, human rights abuses, and the criminal underworld. The site's contributors also publish guides to their techniques, as well as case studies. Bellingcat began as an investigation into the use of weapons in the Syrian Civil War. Its reports on the Russo-Ukrainian War (including the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17), the El Junquito raid, the Yemeni Civil War, the Skripal poisoning, and the killing of civilians by the Cameroon Armed Forces have attracted international attention. Name The name derives from the idiom " belling the cat", which comes from a medieval fable about mice who discuss how to make a cat harmless. One mo ...
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2019–present Sri Lankan Economic Crisis
The Sri Lankan economic crisis is an ongoing crisis in the island-state of Sri Lanka that started in 2019. It is the country's worst economic crisis since its independence in 1948. It has led to unprecedented levels of inflation, near-depletion of foreign exchange reserves, shortages of medical supplies, and an increase in prices of basic commodities. The crisis is said to have begun due to multiple compounding factors like tax cuts, money creation, a nationwide policy to shift to organic or biological farming, the 2019 Sri Lanka Easter bombings, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in Sri Lanka. The subsequent economic hardships resulted in the 2022 Sri Lankan protests. Sri Lanka had been earmarked for sovereign default, as the remaining foreign exchange reserves of US$1.9 billion as of March 2022 would not be sufficient to pay the country's foreign debt obligations for 2022, with $4 billion to be repaid. An International Sovereign Bond repayment of $1 billion ...
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