Students of the Eastern University in Batticaloa protested on Tuesday in solidarity with Tamil political prisoners currently hunger striking for their release.

Sri Lanka’s forest department has appropriated 100 acres of cultivation land belonging to around 50 families in Mullaitivu. The department appropriated the land in Puliyamunai, a village in Semmalai East, designating it as protected conservation land.

The affected landowners said they rely on agriculture for livelihood and that the land-grab has thrown their lives into disarray.

The current families of Puliyamunai had been cultivating there in the 1970s but were displaced due to the war between 1983 and 2015.

Granting permission for Buddhist monks to carry out ‘research’ on a Mullaitivu mountain was an abuse of power by the Sri Lankan archaeology department, the Mullaitivu court has warned. The court also said that devotees were free to access the mountain to worship at the existing Hindu temple.

The warning was in relation to an incident on September 4 when a group of Sinhalese people, including two Buddhist monks, arrived in Kurunthurmalai in Mullaitivu with a Buddha statue and installation equipment, angering locals who believed they had come to erect a Buddhist shrine. The group were apprehended by locals and handed over to Oddusuddan police.

A Tamil woman was arrested for possession of cannabis in Vavuniya according to police.

Vavuniya said the 25-year-old was found to have 650g of cannabis in her possession during a random search operation at Vavuniya railway station on Monday night.

Families of the disappeared demonstrated in Batticaloa on Monday to mark International Children’s Day.

A Tamil man was arrested in Valvettithurai accused of being in possession of cannabis.

Valvettithurai police said the 27-year-old was arrested after a random stop-and-search in which they discovered 5g of cannabis on his person.

Protests in solidarity with hunger striking Tamil political prisoners have continued across the Tamil homeland.

Ships from the Japanese navy arrived in Colombo this weekend as part of a goodwill visit to the island.

The ships, ‘Kaga’ and ‘Inazuma’, docked on Sunday and will stay for 5 days, as Japanese troops “take part in a wide range of sporting and several other programmes,” reportedly organised by the Sri Lanka navy.

The Sri Lankan military announced it had held an art competition for Tamil schoolchildren in Mullaitivu this weekend, as its militarisation of the region persists.

Sri Lanka’s president Maithripala Sirisena met with both the United Nations Secretary General, Antonio Guterres and Commonwealth Secretary General, Patricia Scotland whilst in New York last week, where they discussed “reconciliation” on the island.

The Sri Lankan president’s official media outlet claimed both Guterres and Scotland “praised Sri Lanka” for “progress”, though there have been no press releases from the UN Secretary General’s office or the Commonwealth on the meetings.