Daily View 2×2: 22 November 2009 – Sri Lanka vows to free 130,000 Tamil refugees

It’s Sunday. It’s 7am and we’ve got some coffee art to wake you up this morning. But first, the blogs and then the news.

2 Must-Read Blog Posts

What are other Liberal Democrat bloggers saying? Here’s are two posts that have caught the eye from the Liberal Democrat Blogs aggregator:

• Mathematical error leads to blunder by Local Government Boundary Commission for Wales reports Ali Goldsworthy on Freedom Central
• Christians engage with politics – quite rightly as Lynne Featherstone reports on a visit to a local church group

Spotted any other great posts in the last day from blogs that aren’t on the aggregator? Do post up a comment sharing them with us all.

2 Big Stories

Sri Lanka vows to free 130,000 Tamil refugees

Sri Lanka today bowed to international pressure and announced plans to close the internment camps that are home to more than 130,000 people locked up since the end of the country’s bitter civil war six months ago.

Two days after the UN’s top humanitarian official, Sir John Holmes, urged Sri Lanka to allow those inside the camps to leave, the government in Colombo announced that the internees would be set free from their barbed wire enclosures from 1 December. [The Observer]

Asbestos: A shameful legacy

The authorities knew it was deadly more than 100 years ago, but it was only banned entirely in 1999. The annual death rate will peak at more than 5,000 in 2016 – now MPs have a chance to do the decent thing…

On Wednesday, a meeting between MPs and government lawyers will determine if people suffering from pleural plaques can be paid the compensation that many believe they deserve. For 21 years, sufferers of pleural plaques were compensated by their employers for the scars caused by exposure to the deadly fibres, but in 2007 this was overturned by a Law Lords ruling. Politicians and medical experts accuse the Government of pandering to the insurance lobby and claim they are now ignoring crucial new medical evidence which reveals the physical and mental toll of pleural plaques. [Independent on Sunday]

Sunday Bonus

Coffee is more than just a source of caffeine, as this clip from YouTube demonstrates: