Reality Check

Just before the presidential election of November 16, 2019, the UK’s Guardian newspaper began its editorial on Sri Lanka with this line: “There are worse things than disappointment…” But the electorate, fed up with the broken promises,…
Read More...

By Alan Keenan and K. Mudiyanse Sri Lanka, long-plagued by political violence and near-complete impunity for crimes by the State and pro-State forces, now faces a new assault on justice and the rule of law. There is a systematic attempt…
Read More...

By P. K. Balachandran COLOMBO - The US$ 2.5 billion Indian film industry, which churns out more than a thousand movies a year and is watched by millions, is now facing an intense political heat it faced only once before, in 1975-77, when…
Read More...

By Tharmapalan Tilaxan This is what you see when I photographed elephants looking for food in a huge garbage mountain in Oluvil in the Ampara district. The easiest way to remove garbage in Sri Lanka is to go to a forest somewhere and…
Read More...

By Dmitry Zaks TERTER - Tears didn't well up in Tatyana Pashayeva's eyes until the shells were exploding all around as she hid in an Azerbaijani basement by the Nagorno-Karabakh frontline. "I am so, so frightened," the 56-year-old…
Read More...

By Marie Fazio In many ways, Carlo Acutis was a typical teenager. He loved his PlayStation and making videos of his dogs. He favoured Nikes and jeans, and he had a cellphone and an email address. But in one significant respect, Carlo —…
Read More...

By Shreen Saroor In October 1990, some 75,000 Muslims in the Northern Province (about 5% of the Province’s total) were forcibly expelled from their homeland by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). In some places the rebels gave…
Read More...

By Mujib Mashal DOHA — They are here to end their fathers’ war. On both sides of the negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban are nearly a dozen children of men who played key roles in the Soviet conflict in the…
Read More...

BEIJING - The tragic case of a rural livestreamer who died after being set alight by her ex-husband has triggered outrage over domestic violence on Chinese social media. The 30-year-old woman, named Lamu, died on Wednesday (Sept 30)…
Read More...

By P. K. Balachandran COLOMBO - The cancellation of the Japanese-funded Light Railway Transport (LRT) project in Colombo by the Sri Lankan government may have been based on rational grounds, weighing its “limited use” against the “huge…
Read More...