Holocaust survivor, Jewish icon, and Nobel laureate, Professor Elie Wiesel, in a message posted on his website said: "Wherever minorities are being persecuted we must raise our voices to protest. According to reliable sources, the Tamil people are being disenfranchised and victimized by the Sri Lanka authorities. This injustice must stop. The Tamil people must be allowed to live in peace and flourish in their homeland."

Sri Lanka has accused the International Monetary Fund of politicizing financial aid following the fund's delay in considering a 1.9 billion dollar bailout for the war-ravaged economy.

A SLA soldier was killed and two wounded in a clash that erupted at Kiraankulam in Batticaloa lagoon area in the early hours of Saturday, July 4 sources in Batticaloa said.

THE Tamil National Alliance, the largest Tamil political party in Sri Lanka, has submitted its nominations for the forthcoming municipal council elections in Jaffna and Vavuniya.

When President Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka declared victory over the Tamil Tigers in May, he reached out to the Tamil minority that the defeated LTTE had claimed to represent over 26 years of civil war.

An opposition MP in Sri Lanka has condemned the state of the internment camps in which Tamil civilians are being held.

Sri Lankan authorities appear to be building permanent camps to house many of the 300,000 refugees from the last phase of the war with the Tamil Tigers, despite promising to resettle 80 per cent of them by the end of the year.

Sri Lanka's top rights panel said has concluded investigations into the murder of 17 local employees of a French charity and six other high profile cases from the island's civil war, but refused to publish the outcome.

A new group of eminent Tamil people in Sri Lanka has made a plea for those held in government camps to be given a timetable for their release.

Updating its travel advisory to Sri Lanka, Britain warned its nationals “against all travel to the north and east of Sri Lanka, and to Yala National Park and the areas around it.” The new advisory was issued with an update on new surveillance measures at Bandaranayake International Airport related to A (H1N1) Swine Flu.

Sri Lanka will ‘never go after donor countries or agencies with a begging bowl’ for aid, the country’s Central Bank chief has declared despite waiting for the IMF to approve a loan request for US $1.9 billion.

“We are in an open jail,” Kumar whispers, his skinny shoulders shaking as he looks around to check who is watching “Help us, we want to be free.”

Over one hundred thousand expatriate Tamils in Britain marched Saturday, June 20, through central London to express their outrage at international inaction over Sri Lanka’s massacre of tens of thousands of Tamils and the suffering of hundreds of thousands more enduring starvation, disease, disappearance, rape and torture in Colombo’s internment camps.

Sri Lanka is hoping the end of the decades long war will attract much needed foreign investment boosting the ailing economy.