Sri Lanka News Updates with Discussions

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka: A red-robbed Buddhist monk calmly picked up stones and hurled them at a security camera. Then, as police looked on, his followers smashed up a popular, Muslim-owned clothing store.

Last month`s attack on the Fashion Bug chain near Colombo, filmed by a local television station whose cameraman was attacked by the mob, was the most public outburst in a growing anti-Muslim campaign by Sri Lanka`s Buddhist nationalist groups.

Several people have been injured in Sri Lanka`s capital, Colombo, when Buddhist monks led hundreds in an assault on a Muslim-owned clothing warehouse.

Buddhist monks were filmed throwing stones at the storage centre of popular garment chain Fashion Bug in a suburb of the capital on Thursday night.

Police told AFP news agency that forces had been deployed to guard the area.

DURBAN: The BRICS grouping of emerging powers on Tuesday reached a deal to establish a development bank that would rival Western-backed institutions, South Africa`s finance minister said.

`It`s done,` minister Pravin Gordhan said after meeting with his counterparts from Brazil, Russia, India and China.

`We made very good progress, the leaders will announce the details,` he added, just hours before a summit in the South African port city of Durban.

NEW DELHI: Welcoming Italy`s decision to send back its naval guards, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on Friday that their return would be in accordance with the directions of the Supreme Court and consistent with the dignity of the judicial process in India.

`We are happy with the outcome. I welcome the return of Italian naval guards,` Manmohan Singh told reporters as the naval guards accused of killing two Indian fishermen headed back to stand trial in India.

Callum Macrae: Without truth, there can be no justice or peace
Manoj Ramachandran,Feb 22, 2013, 12.00AM IST
Callum Macrae`s documentary No Fire Zone: Sri Lanka`s Killing Fields is making waves, showing war crimes during the LTTE-government conflict. Speaking with Manoj Ramachandran , Macrae discussed his views on the Sri Lankan government, why accountability is crucial and how India can help:

ALMOST FOUR years ago, the Sri Lankan government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa won a decisive victory in a 26-year-long civil war with rebels from the island`s minority Tamil community. The cost was horrific: A United Nations investigation subsequently found that up to 40,000 civilians may have died in the government`s final offensive. But the triumph made Mr. Rajapaksa a hero among the majority Sinhalese community and gave him an opportunity to modernize his country while healing its ethnic rift.

It is a war that has produced some truly terrible images, but this one is particularly disturbing. A young boy sits looking distressed, like a child who has been lost in a supermarket. He has been given a biscuit or some kind of snack. In the second photograph, he is looking anxiously up, as though hoping to see someone he recognises.

The boy is Balachandran Prabakaran, the 12-year-old son of Tamil Tiger leader Velupillai Prabakaran.

These photographs, which we are releasing today, form part of the new evidence in the forthcoming feature documentary No Fire Zone: The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka, the culmination of three years of research which will be shown for the first time next month in Geneva, to coincide with the U.N. Human Rights Council meeting. The new evidence in the film is certain to increase pressure on the Indian government not only to support a resolution on Sri Lanka and accountability, but also to ensure that it is robustly worded, and that it outlines an effective plan for international action to end impunity in Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka President Mahinda Rajapaksa today left for a two-day personal visit to India during which he will offer prayers at Bodh Gaya and Tirupathi but will not engage with Indian leaders.

He would visit Bodh Gaya and Tirupathi and the visit is of a personal nature, the presidential officials said here.

Rajapaksa would not be visiting New Delhi, the officials asserted, dismissing notions that the Sri Lankan President might engage some of the Indian leaders with a view to seeking New Delhi`s support on the US-moved resolution against Sri Lanka at the next UN Human Rights Council sessions in March.

WASHINGTON Two senators are urging the Obama administration to seek an independent international investigation into allegations of war crimes in Sri Lanka.

Democrats Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Patrick Leahy of Vermont sent a letter Tuesday to outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, saying Sri Lanka`s government has done nothing to bring to justice those responsible for atrocities in the civil war that ended in 2009.

Thousands of civilians died in the final months of the war when the Sri Lankan military launched a decisive offensive against ethnic Tamil rebels. Sri Lanka set up a commission to investigate alleged abuses, but rights groups say the military is not being held to account.

New Delhi: S.A. Ibrahim Tuesday took over as chief of India`s premium intelligence agency, `IB`, becoming the first Muslim Indian to hold the post.

Home ministry sources said Ibrahim took over as IB director Tuesday.

Ibrahim, an IPS officer of the Madhya Pradesh cadre, has taken over as from Nehchal Sandhu who retired Dec 31. He will hold the post for two years.

Ibrahim was appointed officer on special duty in IB last month after the government decided to elevate him as the head of the organisation. He was serving as special director in the IB earlier.

It`s the largest Indian development project abroad and is aiming to help those displaced during the last Eelam war
It`s been hardly four months since the second phase of the India-assisted housing project got under way here, but already about a dozen houses of the 43,000 planned have been completed.

Already about 10 houses are ready under our area itself, said United Nations Human Settlement Programme`s National project Manager I.A. Hameed. UN-HABITAT is one of the three implementing agencies selected by the Indian authorities. The Indian High Commissioner to Sri Lanka Ashok K. Kantha said work on building more than 5000 houses had already commenced.

THE ASAHI SHIMBUN

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda will seek a closer security alliance between Japan and India as part of efforts to counter China`s sovereignty claims to the Senkaku Islands, which would include additional naval exercises between the two countries.

But he will maintain a calm stance over the dispute at upcoming international conferences to underscore differences from an increasingly vociferous and belligerent China.

In the backdrop of protests against President Mahinda Rajapaksa`s visit to Madhya Pradesh, the state Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan today said it was expected from Sri Lanka to treat Tamils with equality and Colombo should highlight steps taken by it in this direction to clear doubts in the minds of people of both the nations.

Stressing on strong and cordial relations between India and Sri Lanka, Chouhan said that `it was expected from the island nation to treat Tamils with equality and the President should highlight the work being undertaken by his government in this regard` during a brief interaction with Rajapaksa in the State Hangar, official sources said.

New Delhi: The LTTE tortured and killed alleged spies and `traitors` and also looted Tamil shops and homes while fighting the Indian peacekeepers in Sri Lanka, a book by a former woman fighter says.

Niromi de Soyaza, who joined the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in early 1987 at age 17 and now lives in Australia, says she quit the group after realising that violence cannot lead to a Tamil Eelam state.

KARACHI: Few Pakistanis know what the Higgs boson is and even fewer realise that some of the earliest theoretical groundwork that led to this discovery was laid by Pakistan`s only Nobel laureate, Dr Abdus Salam.

The Higgs boson is a subatomic particle whose existence was confirmed by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (known by its French acronym, CERN) on July 4. The discovery of the particle provides the last remaining bit of empirical evidence necessary for the Standard Model of physics, which seeks to explain the existence of all forces in the universe except gravity.