Military rescues Sri Lanka's Prime Minister in pre-dawn operation as violent clashes leave seven dead

Sri Lanka's outgoing Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa was rescued in a pre-dawn military operation Tuesday, hours after his resignation, as violent clashes between pro and anti-government protesters left several dead and 217 injured.

The military were called to the Prime Minister's 'Temple Trees' compound after protesters tried to breach his private residence twice overnight, a senior security source told CNN.

The attackers managed to "enter the outer perimeter" of the residence where they hurled petrol bombs, but their attempts to enter the building were thwarted when the military fired tear gas, according to the source. One police officer involved in the clashes died at the scene when a tear gas gun exploded, the security official said, confirming that Prime Minister Rajapaksa and his family have since been taken to an undisclosed location.

The scenes followed an evening of violent clashes across Sri Lanka's capital Colombo on Monday, during which at least seven people died according to police, although it is unclear if all of the deaths were directly related to the protests.

Some 217 people were also injured as a result of the clashes, local health authorities reported.

Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa quit on Monday evening shortly after a nationwide curfew was imposed. The curfew came after live television showed footage of government supporters, armed with sticks, beating protesters at several locations across the capital, including at Galle Face Green park, and tearing down and burning their tents. Dozens of homes were torched across the country amid the violence, according to witnesses CNN spoke to. The park has become a focal point for protesters who have been demonstrating for weeks against the government's alleged mishandling of an economic crisis that has caused prices of everyday goods to soar and widespread electricity shortages.

from Zero Hedge:

Sri Lanka’s Organic Experiment a Stark Warning

...Sri Lanka’s recent experiment with abandoning chemical fertilizer has plunged the island nation into chaos that shows no signs of letting up.

According to a 2021 report from the USDA Foreign Agriculture service, Sri Lankan agricultural economists warned that a rapid shift from chemical to organic fertilizers “will result in significant drops in crop yields.”

The country has since had to compensate one million of its farmers to the tune of $200 million, as reported by Al Jazeera.

With food shortages now a reality, anti-government protests prompted Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to declare a state of emergency on May 6—the second in two months.

“[Sri Lanka is] now literally on the verge of famine, because they’ve had massive crop failures,” Gunasekara said.

who could have seen this coming...………...

You might be wondering why they don't like the just-resigned Prime Minister. It's because he QUADRUPLED food prices almost overnight by requiring organic agriculture.

In today's Power Line Blog...

Another “Green” Catastrophe
We briefly noted here the agricultural apocalypse occurring in Sri Lanka:
[W]here are the environmentalists in all this? They are doing their best to reduce agricultural output. In Sri Lanka, the government mandated organic farming, with the result that yields declined catastrophically, prices skyrocketed, and, no doubt, many died.
The London Times had a more detailed account last month, headlined: “How Sri Lanka’s shift to organic farming left it in the manure.”
What turned Sri Lanka’s economic situation from difficult to catastrophic was the decision by the Rajapaksa government to implement a nationwide ban on synthetic fertiliser. It was made not at the behest of neoliberal economists doing the bidding of global capital, but rather on the advice of environmentalists in the name of sustainable agriculture.
***
[T]hat strategy backfired in spectacular fashion. Domestic rice production fell by 14 per cent from 2021 to 2022, forcing the nation, long self-sufficient in rice production, to import hundreds of millions of dollars of rice and more than eroding all of the savings from ceasing fertiliser imports. On top of that, the ban decimated tea production, leading to a $425 million economic loss to the industry in its first six months of implementation. Tea, one of the nation’s primary crops, is a key source of its total export income, making a bad foreign exchange situation far worse.
***
Any competent agronomist could have predicted the result. And many did. Long-term use of synthetic fertilisers had helped Sri Lanka become not only food-secure but a major agricultural exporter. A survey of Sri Lanka’s farmers last July found that 75 per cent of them relied on synthetic fertilisers. For crops that are crucial sources of foreign currency and domestic food security — tea, rubber and rice — the dependence was even higher.
Food prices in Sri Lanka have quadrupled. One of the problems with environmentalists is that their prescriptions are often unmoored from reality. And yet they continue to get mostly good press around the world.

Maybe “environmentalists” are not unmoored from reality.

“In fact, it’s estimated that nitrogen fertilizer now supports approximately half of the global population. In other words, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch — the pioneers of this technological breakthrough — are estimated to have enabled the lives of several billion people, who otherwise would have died prematurely, or never been born at all.”

https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-people-does-synthetic-fertilizer-feed

In other words without synthetic fertilizer about four billion people will starve.

Now about those Georgia Guidestones.....

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