PMK on Monday, January 5 charged the Congress led union government of "humiliating" the government and people of Tamil Nadu state by not taking steps to ensure a ceasefire in Sri Lanka.

Jan Jananayagam, an independent candidate contesting the European Parliament elections in London, secured over 50,000 votes, an unprecedented result, and a record for an independent candidate in an EU election.

Government of Sri Lanka turned away the ship, MV Captain Ali, carrying relief supplies to the Tamils held in internment camps, after keeping the ship under Sri Lanka Navy (SLN) custody for nearly 4.5 days, and after admitting that the ship carried purely humanitarian supplies, a press release from the Mercy Mission Head Office in the UK said.

The following is the full text of an editorial in the Japan Times titled “What price victory?”. Japan is Sri Lanka’s biggest bilateral donor.

Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a New York based media watchdog, in a special reported, said Sri Lanka topped the list of countries that drove the largest number of journalists into exile.

A 73-day protest involving thousands of people demonstrating over the plight of Tamils ended on Wednesday, June 17.

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.

“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.”

Human Rights Watch called for the end to the illegal detention of nearly 300,000 ethnic Tamils displaced by the recently ended conflict.

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

Calls for investigations into allegations of war crimes by the Sri Lankan government during the final stages of its military offensive against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) appear to be gathering strength.

An independent international commission must be set up to investigate human rights violations in Sri Lanka over the last 20 years, as successive governments have failed to account for abuses such as torture, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings during its civil war, Amnesty International said.

A Tamil staff of United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) and another Tamil staff of the UNHCR, both attached to the UN offices in Vavuniya, have been reported missing since Thursday June13 after being arrested by Sri Lankan authorities, the UN announced on Sunday June 21.

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.