Elephant walks into a hotel...

woke up to a text from my mom about how a wild elephant went into a Sri Lankan hotel and gently wandered around while poking stuff with his trunk pic.twitter.com/C2biQT8C30

— Upuli 🇱🇰 (@upidaisy) January 19, 2020

"Last week a Sri Lankan MP had proposed a ban on women wearing the burka, saying it should be outlawed on security grounds."

"Muslim groups have been highly critical of the president's decision. 'It is the stupidest thing to do. Three days ago we [the Muslim community] took a voluntary decision regarding this. The All Ceylon Jamiyyathul Ulema told all Muslim women not to wear face veils for security reasons. If they wanted to wear a veil, then they were told not to come out,' Hilmy Ahmed, vice-president of the Sri Lanka Muslim Council...."

From "Sri Lanka attacks: Face coverings banned after Easter bloodshed" (BBC).

ISIS claims responsibility for the Easter bombings in Sri Lanka.

The NYT reports.

The government of Sri Lanka blames an Islamist group — National Thowheeth Jama’ath.

The NYT reports.

Sri Lanka’s security forces were warned at least 10 days before the bombings that the militant group was planning attacks against churches, but apparently took no action against it, indicating a catastrophic intelligence failure....

The group, National Thowheeth Jama’ath, had a reputation for vandalizing Buddhist statues but little history of carrying out terrorist attacks.

Rajitha Senaratne, the health minister, called the group “a local organization” and said the suicide bombers appeared to be Sri Lankan citizens. “All are locals,” he said at a news conference on Monday. But, he added, “there was an international network without which these attacks could not have succeeded.”...

No one has publicly claimed responsibility for the bombings.

Sri Lanka does not have much history of Islamist terrorism. The country is predominantly Buddhist, with significant Hindu, Muslim and Christian minorities.

"A series of coordinated explosions struck three churches and three hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, killing more than 200 people and injuring 450."

"Blasts ripped through three churches in the cities of Colombo, Negombo and Batticaloa at approximately 8:45 a.m. as worshipers were gathering for services. Explosions also took place at four hotels within Colombo, the nation’s capital, police said, while an eighth blast occurred under a flyover within the city. There has been no claim of responsibility for the bombings.... Sri Lankan authorities... blocked Facebook and the messaging application WhatsApp to stop the spread of false and inflammatory messages."

WaPo reports.

ADDED: A "flyover" is "A railway or road bridge over another (e.g. a local over a main) line or road" (OED). This word goes back to 1901. I've never seen the word with this meaning. The American use of the word — which the OED calls "U.S. colloquial (depreciative)" — is "Designating the central regions of the continental United States over which aeroplanes travel on flights between the east and west coasts, regarded as less influential or significant than the urban coastal regions." This usage is traced to an article in Esquire by Thomas McGuane in 1980: "Because we live in flyover country, we try to figure out what is going on elsewhere by subscribing to magazines."

Mark Zuckerberg tries to reposition after seeming to attribute benign motives to Holocaust deniers.

I'm reading "Mark Zuckerberg clarifies his Holocaust comments" at CNN. Zuckerberg had spoken, in a long interview, about what Facebook deletes and what it allows:

"At the end of the day, I don't believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong," Zuckerberg told [ReCode's Kara] Swisher. "I don't think that they're intentionally getting it wrong.... It's hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent. I just think, as abhorrent as some of those examples are, I think the reality is also that I get things wrong when I speak publicly"...

He used Holocaust denial as his example of people perhaps just getting something wrong. That should not be deleted, in Zuckerberg's approach, because you can't tell that it's the intentional spreading of misinformation.

"Holocaust denial is a willful, deliberate and longstanding deception tactic by anti-Semites that is incontrovertibly hateful, hurtful, and threatening to Jews," Jonathan Greenblat, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a statement to CNNMoney. "Facebook has a moral and ethical obligation not to allow its dissemination."

Within hours, Zuckerberg emailed Swisher to say he got things wrong.

"I personally find Holocaust denial deeply offensive, and I absolutely didn't intend to defend the intent of people who deny that," he wrote in the email.

I think Zuckerberg is trying to say Facebook can't figure out intent and doesn't want to have a policy that depends on judgment of intent even when the intent seems obvious. But there is another policy that's not dependent on a judgment of intent. Facebook takes down content is false and contributes to imminent violence (such as posts about Muslims in Sri Lanka serving poisoned food to Buddhists).

Tourist with a Buddha tattoo barred from Sri Lanka.

Some Brit was deemed too disrespectful, not just because of the tattoo, but because when he was asked about it, he spoke "very disrespectfully."

Irrelevant factoid: As I typed the word "Buddha" just now, the word "Buddha" came up in the song I was listening to. There's Judy Garland taking Buddha by the hand.... Feel free to get a tattoo of that.

ADDED: More detail here.

"As soon as he saw it the chief officer went crazy. You could see it on his face, he looked really angry and said I would have to go back to London," [Antony] Ratcliffe told the BBC....

"I like the artwork in tattoos obviously and, due to my belief in Buddhist philosophy which I have followed for many years, I thought a quality tattoo of the Buddha was rather apt.... The whole experience has been a shock - it has been upsetting and a waste of my time. I'm not taking it further, but when I saw they had accused me of speaking disrespectfully about Buddhism, I had to put my side of the story"....

Sri Lanka prosecutes 3 French tourists for photographs of themselves pretending to kiss Buddha statues.

Somehow in this age of digital photography they were using a photo lab and they didn't wait until they got home to process the photos. The local lab called the police.

On Tuesday a magistrate sentenced the trio to six months in prison with hard labour, suspended for five years - which means they will not actually serve any time in jail. The court also levied a small fine on them.

They were convicted under a section of the Penal Code which outlaws deeds intended to wound or insult "the religious feelings of any class of persons" through acts committed in, upon or near sacred objects or places of worship.

Last month there were reports that five Arabs visiting the island were arrested for distributing "literature insulting to Buddhism."

Astrologer arrested.

"Astrology is taken seriously by numerous Sri Lankan politicians."

***

Yes, yes, I know, don't be smug...

"We swam out of the room neck deep in water, forcing our way through the tables and chairs in the restaurant and up into a tree."

A BBC reporter in Sri Lanka reports on his escape from the earthquake's tidal wave and describes the situation there now ("There are no kind of emergency services here ... There are no real medical services here").