By Amantha Perera (IPS) | Relief Web
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A bloody civil war was reaching its climax but this Tamil family, who had already experienced the conflict intimately, had one last decision to make that would prove to be the hardest one of all.
Fighting during the early months of 2009, in the last phase of Sri Lanka’s 30 year-long civil conflict, was so intense that a Tamil couple in their sixties was forced to make a heart-wrenching choice when they fled the bloody warzone: whether or not to leave behind Thangamathi, the elderly unmarried sister in the family who had been mentally handicapped since birth and required constant care.
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The Economist
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In a war-scarred pocket of jungle in north-eastern Sri Lanka are the remains of the last stronghold of the rebel group, the Tamil Tigers, before they were wiped out by the armed forces in 2009. It looks like a godforsaken place: just to get there busloads of people drive through a swelteringly hot landscape of bombed-out houses, emaciated cattle and mangled cars. But then, surreally, appears a swimming pool, 25 metres long and seven metres deep. This was where government photographs once showed Velupillai Prabhakaran, the pudgy leader of the Tigers, taking a dip and reclining on a lilo.
As wartime propaganda goes, the images were unbeatable. In fact, the pool also had a serious purpose. The frogmen of the rebels’ crack naval wing, the Sea Tigers, trained there, learning to destroy ships by attaching magnetic mines to their hulls.
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By Dasun Edirisinghe | The Island
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University teachers were disappointed that Presidential Secretary Lalith Weeratunga had not called them for the third round of discussions, which was earlier scheduled to be held on Monday or Tuesday evening, at the Presidential Secretariat.
President of the Federation of University Teachers Associations (FUTA) Dr. Nirmal Ranjith Devasiri said that their strike was continuing as the government authorities had failed to address their demands so far.
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By Bruce Haigh | The Canberra Times
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Fairfax senior correspondent Daniel Flitton reported on July 18 that the AFP had dropped an investigation of war crimes into the Sri Lankan High Commissioner, former Admiral, Thisara Samarasinghe.
Samarasinghe joined the Sri Lankan navy in 1974 and retired in 2011, after his appointment to Australia became known. Samarasinghe was Chief of Staff of the Sri Lankan navy in 2009 when the navy carried out the shelling of Tamil women and children in a safe zone designated by the Sri Lankan defence force, in the north of the country, at the end of the civil war between the Tamils and the Sinhalese.
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By Ranga Sirilal and Shihar Aneez | Reuters
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Sri Lanka will amend a decades-old media law in order to bring in all news websites and electronic media under regulation, the government said on Monday, a week after it raided and temporarily closed down two anti-government websites.
The amendments to the Press Council Law enacted in 1973 will allow the government to order websites and electronic media to follow media codes in addition to print media.
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By Charles Haviland | BBC News
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The parents of a prisoner who died in obscure circumstances in Sri Lanka are locked in a battle with officials who say his body cannot be taken to his home town for the last rites.
Ganesan Nimalaruban died and several other inmates, all Tamil Tiger suspects, were reportedly injured after a failed prison mutiny in the north.
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By Frederica Jansz | The Sunday Leader
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Defence Secretary, Gotabaya Rajapaksa went berserk when contacted by The Sunday Leader to clarify and find out if he was aware that the management at SriLankan Airlines had taken a decision to change a wide bodied A340 scheduled to fly to Zurich on Friday July 13, to a smaller A330. The change was to be made so that a SriLankan Airline pilot, who is dating a niece of President Mahinda Rajapaksa could personally fly the aircraft that would carry a ‘puppy dog’ for Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa from Zurich.
The Sunday Leader was told by senior airline pilots that 56 passengers would have had to be off-loaded if the aircraft was changed.
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By Paul Canning | Care 2
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The British government is continuing to deport Tamil asylum seekers to Sri Lanka despite more evidence emerging that some of those removed are being tortured.
As I reported last year, there is a wealth of evidence that Sri Lankan authorities continue to practice torture on political opponents. Yet British authorities have insisted that the country is safe and hundreds of those fleeing the country have been returned.
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By Kishali Pinto Jayawardene | The Sunday Times
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Is there any other country in the civilized world where the police act under a repealed section of the penal law when making arrests and that gigantic mistake is then sought to be justified by government ministers in the legislative assembly by resorting to the most annoying twaddle?
This is a pertinent question in the wake of recent arrests by the police of opposition web journalists under Section 118 of Sri Lanka’s Penal Code. This Section was however repealed in June 2002 by Penal Code Amendment Act, No 12 of 2002. Section 118 of the Penal Code relates to attempts to bring the President into contempt by contumacious or insulting words or signs and was repealed under the hand of the United National Front government along with the sections relating to criminal defamation.
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Photo courtesy: Roy del Vecchio | flickr
By Indo Asian News Service | Yahoo! News
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Sri Lanka has seen a rise in the number of underage children being raped or abused this year, the police said Thursday.
Over 700 incidents of rape or abuse of children were reported during the first six months of this year, police spokesperson Ajith Rohana told Xinhua.
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By Qadijah Irshad | Khaleej Times
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The Sri Lankan government has been accused of human rights violation following the closure of two opposition websites this week.
While human rights organisations called the raids a part of a the government’s bid to intimidate and harass all critical journalists, the US and the UN have severely criticised the move.
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AFP
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Sri Lanka hit back Wednesday over claims it is clamping down on press freedom after criticism from rights groups and Washington for its shuttering of opposition news websites.
"Look at the newspapers in Sri Lanka. Can you possibly say that there is no freedom of press in the country? There is so much," Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Gamini Lakshman Peiris told reporters in Tokyo.
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Lanka Business Online
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Sri Lanka’s state investment promotion agency said it had inked a deal with a Singapore led consortium to build a 3 billion US dollar tourism city in Katana, north of the capital Colombo.
A consortium led by Asian Resorts, Casinos, a Singapore based firm, will invest in Katana City Developments Private Limited, the project company.
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Lanka Business Online
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Sri Lanka should implement several key measures contained in a report by a commission which studied lessons to be learnt from a recent civil war, some of which can be done without delay, a civil organization of professionals has said.
Sri Lanka's Organization of Professional Association, a civil society organization said a report by Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) had come up with many good recommendations to promote good governance and ethnic reconciliation.
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IRIN
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Sri Lankan parliamentarians in favour of acting on the recommendations in a report into the final stages of the country’s civil war by the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) are slowly gaining ground over those who are not, says a presidential peace process adviser.
The government’s initial reaction to the LLRC recommendations was positive, presidential adviser and parliamentarian Rajiva Wijesinha told IRIN, but others saw the report, released just over six months ago, as a call for regime change and were “highly critical”.
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Human Rights Watch
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The Sri Lankan government should immediately end harassment of media outlets and journalists in violation of the right to freedom of expression, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday (03). In the three years since the end of the armed conflict with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government has expanded its efforts to silence critical views.
On June 29, 2012, the Criminal Investigation Department, acting on a court order, raided the offices of the Sri Lanka Mirror, a news website, and Sri Lanka X News, a website of the opposition United National Party. The authorities confiscated computers and documents, and arrested nine people on the grounds that the websites were “propagating false and unethical news on Sri Lanka.” They were charged under article 120 of the Penal Code, which imposes up to two years in prison for those who “excite or attempt to excite feelings of disaffection to the president or to the government.” The day after their arrest the nine were released on bail.
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Xinhua | China Radio International
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The United States will remain engaged with Sri Lanka despite some differences of opinion on the political front, the U.S. ambassador to Sri Lanka said on Wednesday.
In a message released in Colombo to mark America's Independence Day, the U.S. envoy in Colombo Patricia Butenis noted that the Sri Lankan government has made progress on the resettlement issue and post war development.
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Xinhua-ANI | Newstrack India
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The main minority Tamil political party in Sri Lanka said on Tuesday that moves aimed at reaching a political solution to the ethnic issue in the country remained deadlocked.
Tamil National Alliance (TNA) legislator M.A. Sumanthiran told Xinhua that his party leader R. Sampanthan and the leader of the main opposition United National Party (UNP) Ranil Wickremesinghe had met over the weekend in an attempt to look for a way forward.
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