Sri lanka

Monday

Spectator Editorial

Why ESG is sinister

In contemporary finance, a bank’s “head of responsible investing” is meant to be an apostle of woke capitalism: a very modern kind of money man who tours the world touting all the good their employer is doing. So you might have expected a speech on climate change and finance by Stuart Kirk, the man with that job title at HSBC Asset Management, to be a bromide-filled snoozefest about the win-win nature of the transition to the green economy. But Mr. Kirk’s address at a recent conference on “Moral Money” was nothing of the sort. Instead, he delivered a broadside against the fashionable idea that climate change is a risk that no financial institution can afford to ignore.

esg

Thursday

A.S.H. Smyth

Climbing the walls

Colombo In January, I promised a visiting Army reservist friend that we’d climb Adam’s Peak. That plan was scotched when I came down with dengue fever. But I’d climbed Adam’s Peak before (the first time, Christmas 2004, when the tsunami struck, probably saved my life) and there would always be another chance to do it, right? Things change. Like everyone else in town, I was already bored and irritable from the first week of our lockdown when I saw a burst of British news items on COVID-19 nixing Everest expeditions, pensioners trying to keep fit indoors and some chap figuring out how many stairs it took to ‘top’ the mountains of the British Isles. Challenge accepted.

climbing

Monday

Ben Sixsmith

Why do terrorists attack houses of worship?

With the mosque shooting in New Zealand, the bombings of churches in Sri Lanka and the attack on a synagogue in Poway, California, each of the major monotheistic religions have had places of worship attacked by terrorists almost within a month. Houses of worship are a common target for racial and religious supremacists. In the United States, there have been, within the last decade, neo-Nazi shootings at a gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, a black church in Charleston, South Carolina and the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. These events have kept alive a grim tradition, going back to the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing of 1963, where Ku Klux Klansmen attacked a church with dynamite and killed four little girls.

places of worship

Tuesday

Barbara Boland

Islamic terror and the Left’s pretzeled language

After years of Obama-era State Department obfuscations and Orwellian redactions, it was heartening to hear Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lay the blame for the ‘horrific wave’ of bombings at international hotels and Catholic churches across Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday where it belongs: at the feet of ‘Islamic radical terror.’ Pompeo stated at a press conference Monday that ‘radical Islamic terror remains a threat’ and that the US, along with international partners, is working against the ‘evil’ of ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other radical Islamist groups. That’s a far cry from the antics of the State Department under Obama.

mike pompeo sri lanka