India’s Union Shipping Minister G.K. Vasan has reiterated his call for India not to train Sri Lankan forces.

Talking to reporters in Chennai he said that India should never enter into an agreement with Sri Lanka for providing training to the country’s armed forces, said The Hindu.

The Sri Lankan Army’s commander for Jaffna, Major General Mahinda Hathurusinghe, will take up a new post from Monday.

Delivering some departing remarks, Hathurusinghe claimed that the army did all they could to “meet the urgent needs and aid development” in Jaffna, despite the fact that the people saw the military as a “destructive” force.

"We cannot allow people to go about projecting false propaganda on human right violations against the country. These people don't even know the meaning of the term human rights."

The Palestinian Authority will confer the president of Sri Lanka with its highest accolade, the ‘Star of Palestine’, reported the DailyMirror.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa is due to visit Palestine tomorrow, where he will meet with President Mahmoud Abbas, and will receive the award for showing solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle.

The Palestinian Authority has already named a road after Rajapaksa in Ramallah.

The British Tamil Conservatives have called on the British government to impose travel bans and seize foreign assets on Sri Lankans suspected of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, reported The Island.

Arujuna Sivananthan from the BTC said the group will focus their attention on the UNHRC session in March as Sri Lanka will not have a credible independent inquiry by March and neither will it abide by any eventual resolution passed.

Talks between the US and Sri Lanka on importing Iranian crude oil have been unsuccessful, according to a Sri Lankan official.

Petroleum Resources Minister Anura Priyadarshana Yapa said that several rounds of talks were held both in Colombo and in Washington, but no agreement was found and that the US informed Sri Lanka that it cannot import Iranian oil, in line with sanctions imposed on Teheran.

Non-compliance would mean that Sri Lankan banks would be cut off from the US financial system.