Jaffna residents protest against Kakkaitheevu waste centre over alleged health and environmental hazards

Six Tamil and Muslim parties have agreed to establish a common platform to press Colombo on a new constitution, the long-delayed provincial council elections and unresolved land disputes, in what its architects call the first collective political network of the North-East, Malaiyaha and Muslim peoples in decades.

Nearly a decade after Sri Lanka established the Office on Missing Persons, a new ITJP report says the body has failed to investigate enforced disappearances, failed to use existing state records and left families trapped in another cycle of bureaucracy and denial.

The National People's Power's most senior Tamil figures have dismissed the newly formed six-party platform of Tamil and Muslim parties as doomed, corrupt and Colombo-bound, with a Jaffna MP branding its members "brokers", in a response that left untouched the platform's three demands, every one of them a pledge from the NPP's own manifesto.

When Argentina's players unfurled a banner reading "Las Malvinas son Argentinas" after their World Cup semifinal victory over England this week, the British state required no time for reflection. Within a day, Downing Street had urged FIFA to investigate, ministers had denounced the gesture, and the Prime Minister's spokesperson had delivered the line that "the World Cup might not be ours, but the Falkland Islands definitely are". Beneath the quip sat the position London has held for four decades: that the future of the islands rests on the right of the islanders to self-determination, a right on which Britain's commitment “will never waver”. It went to war on that principle in 1982, at the cost of more than nine hundred lives, and it invokes the principle still, whenever the question is raised.

Eelam Tamils took their case for justice to a multicultural peace festival in the Piedmont town of Valdilana this month, mounting an exhibition on the Tamil genocide, and drew a pledge from one of Italy's foremost peace campaigners, who participants say committed to bringing Tamil history and the genocide into Italian schools nationally.

All 21 prisoners killed during the deadly violence at Negombo Prison were remand detainees awaiting trial and had not been convicted of any offence, according to Sri Lanka’s Department of Prisons.

Footage obtained by the Tamil Guardian appears to show Sri Lankan soldiers selling large quantities of vegetables grown on occupied Tamil land to a Keells collection centre in Jaffna, directly contradicting the deputy defence minister's assurance to parliament, just days earlier, that the military farms this land only to feed itself.

Displaced Tamil landowners of Valikamam North protested at Palaly Junction for a fourth week running, demanding the return of land held by the military for 36 years, as police barred the mostly elderly demonstrators from even erecting a shelter against Jaffna's punishing mid-July sun, days after the government confirmed the land would never be given back.

With the printing presses turning again, its two great foreign-currency lifelines fraying and a fuel bill set to soar as the United States blockades the Strait of Hormuz, Sri Lanka's fragile recovery is being tested from every side, and a debt reckoning in 2028 threatens to tip the island back towards the abyss of 2022.