Feature – News Updates

In the six days after the presidential election the people have again seen the contradictory attitude of some western governments toward Iran. When it was announced that an unusually large number of people participated in the democratic exercise, most if not all western circles admired the political climate in Iran and confessed that such a development was unparalleled in the …

The concept of Responsibility to Protect has triggered resistance in many countries of the Global South precisely because of its potential misapplication to situations such as the Sri Lankan one. Lakshman Kadirgamar, the former Sri Lankan Foreign Minister, was one of the most incisive legal minds of his generation. A former president of the Oxford Union, he made significant contributions …

These documents, including an instructional guide on assassination found among the training files of the CIA’s covert “Operation PBSUCCESS,” were among several hundred records released by the Agency on May 23, 1997 on its involvement in the infamous 1954 coup in Guatemala. After years of answering Freedom of Information Act requests with its standard “we can neither confirm nor deny …

I recently returned from one of my regular Pastoral visits to our Congregations (Churches) and Schools in Jaffna . Such visits are always educative and humbling. What was immediately noticeable was the pre-occupation with routine in the lives of the people; simply because there seems to be little else to look forward to. People went about their daily business and …

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger de-codes the “historic” speech President Obama made in Cairo “reaching out to the Muslim world”, according to the BBC: in reality showing the seductive face of American power as it proceeds towards its unchanged goal. At 7.30 in the morning on 3 June, a seven-month-old baby died in the intensive …

The timeliness of this book review is underlined by these words of President Mahinda Rajapaksa to the people of Sri Lanka on May 19, on the occasion of the country’s ‘30 year war’ coming to a close: “We have removed the word minorities from our vocabulary three years ago. No longer are the Tamils, Muslims, Burghers, Malays and any others …