The United Kingdom is providing £49 million of funding for a British firm to build 250 bridges in rural parts of Sri Lanka.

The project has been designed to accelerate Sri Lanka’s development through improvements in its rural transport infrastructure, UK Export Finance (UKEF) said in a press release.

The department claims that families and businesses would benefit directly from the project thanks to reduced distance to reach essential services and lower transport costs.

<p>Sri Lankan military forces are reported to have released lands in different districts across the North-East this year, although they had already failed to meet the Sri Lankan president’s highly publicised deadline to release all occupied lands by December 31, 2018.</p> <p>On January 22, the Sri Lankan army announced it had released 40.74 acres of state land and 13.64 acres of private land in Vavuniya.</p> <p>In Mannar, the army handed over documents to the district’s government agent (GA) on January 29, confirming the release of 4.5 acres used by 54 and 61 divisions.</p>

<p>A Tamil mother of two was released on bail this week after being imprisoned for four years.&nbsp;</p> <p>The release of the 31-year-old political prisoner came after repeated intiatives by the Mannar Citizens' Committee calling for the release of the woman, whose family live below the poverty line.&nbsp;</p> <p>Mathani Ravinthiran was arrested by the Terrorism Investigation Division (TID) in March 2014 in Visvamadu, Mullaitivu. Welimada Police filed a case with Padaviya Circuit Magistrate Court against her under sections 443, 369 and 394 of Penal Code Act. Another case was filed against her for handling demining equipment.</p>

<p>The Sri Lankan government has made “empty promises” on transitional justice and its willingness to tackle impunity, which is “evidenced by a litany of failures”, write Yasmin Sooka and Frances Harrison for the London School of Economics’ South Asia blog this week.</p>

The history of the Tamil people in the island of Sri Lanka after Western colonisation is a history of oppression by the chauvinist Sinhala-Buddhist state. Because of strength and resilience, the Tamil people acted against this oppression with resistance. This goes from peaceful protest for equal rights to a militant fight for a separate state. Tens of thousands of Tamil civilians and combatants lost their lives throughout the armed conflict.

A former Northern Provincial Council (NPC) minister has written to Vavuniya’s government agent (GA), querying how a Buddha statue was allowed to be placed at an archaeological site in the district.

Former health minister and NPC member P Sathiyalingam wrote to the GA after visiting the wooded land in Kachal Samanankulam where a Buddha statue and huts that are allegedly to make way for a Buddhist vihara and Sinhala settlement were erected recently.

A Tamil political activist has been remanded by a Sri Lankan court over a hartal in protest at the appointment of former UPFA MP Hizbullah as governor of the Eastern Province last month.

Kanapathipillai Mohan, who heads the Thamizh Unarvaalar Amaippu, has had an order issued against him by the Eravur Circuit Magistrate Court, holding him on remand until February 13.

The court head that Mohan was arrested after organising the hartal against Hizbullah, who locals have accused of exacerbating inter-community tensions in the East during his time in the Eastern Provincial Council.

The court also called for the other organisers of the protest to be arrested.

<p>Sri Lanka is facing delays in receiving a $300 million (USD) loan offered by the Bank of China, Reuters reports.</p> <p>The loan was due to be released before the end of January but is now unlikely to be finalised until later this month.</p> <p>A Sri Lankan government official told Reuters that the negotiation, which was due to be closed in the last week of January, had dragged on after the Chinese bank had asked for “in-depth and lengthy data unlike in the previous negotiations” to compile the loan and the Finance Ministry needed more than a week to compile the data.</p>

Students from the University of Jaffna joined an event held by the US Consulate in Chennai to mark Black History Month.

The Jaffna students joined in with the event, a screening of a documentary on black civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr, via video conference.

The screening was held at the same hall in Presidency College where King had addressed students during a historic visit to Chennai fifty years ago.

The former TNA MP Chandranehru and LTTE political head Kousalyan, as well as the LTTE cadres who were killed with them in an ambush by Sri Lankan paramilitaries were remembered in Batticaloa on Thursday.

The group were attacked by gunmen, at the time thought to be Sri Lankan soldiers but later linked to Karuna’s paramilitary, on February 7, 2005, while travelling back to the East from Vanni after a meeting about tsunami rehabilitation efforts.