<p>Sri Lankan President, Maithripala Sirisena, said he rejected an appeal by United Nations Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, to reconsider his restoration of the death penalty after 43 years.</p>
<p>“I told the Secretary-General that I want to save my country from drugs,” Sirisena said in a meeting in Colombo.</p>
<p>A prominent Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka has accused Muslims of destroying the island’s majority Sinhalese community and called for a boycott of Muslim- run shops and businesses.</p>
<p>Monk Warakagoda Sri Gnanarathana, the chief prelate of the Asgiriya Chapter of Buddhism said, “Don’t eat from those (Muslim) shops. Those who ate from those shops will not have children in the future. In another 10 to 15 years, we will know the consequence.”</p>
Conversationists have aligned themselves with shipping groups to lobby the Sri Lanka government to move a 15-mile shipping lane on the south of the island so as to protect a community of blue whales.
A United National Party (UNP) MP was caught wielding a knife amidst Sri Lanka’s parliamentary brawl earlier today.
Video footage and images circulating show MP Palitha Thewarapperuma being restrained before jumping into scuffles wielding a knife on the parliamentary floor.
Similar to the Sinhalicisation of Trincomalee, the capital of the East, Colombo plans for a new, Sinhalicised capital for the North at Kilinochchi, administrative sources working for Colombo on the project said.
The following are the conditions set by the European Commission for a 6 month extension of the GSP+ benefit to Sri Lanka, with the proviso that Sri Lanka had to provide written commitment to these conditions by July 1.
October 2008-2009 – EU investigates Sri Lanka’s commitment to the human rights requirements to receive GSP+ trade concessions and finds that the country had significant shortcomings with regard to three covenants; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the Convention against Torture (CAT) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).
Samantha Power, Director of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights of the National Security Council in the Obama administration, David Pressman, Director for war crimes atrocities and civilian protection of the US National Security Council, and Ms. Patricia A Butenis, Ambassador of the US in Sri Lanka, met with Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapakse on June 15.
In a brief but compelling interview with The Sunday Leader, UN Special Rapporteur on Extra-judicial Executions, Philip Alston slammed a Sri Lanka government initiative, asserting the Commission on Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation will not focus or address human rights, humanitarian law, violations or war crimes.
An early historic inscription in Tamil language and in Tamil Brahmi script, dateable to c.200 BCE, has been found in the archaeological excavations by a German team at Tissamaharama in the south of the island of Sri Lanka.
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