Meeting the TNA leader R. Sampanthan and his delegation, the Indian Foreign Minister SM Krishna stressed the need for early resumption of talks.

The seven member TNA delegation are currently visiting India, and have also met with the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Sampanthan said,

Sri Lanka’s information minister Keheliya Rambukwelle has announced that a joint task force, consisting of private and public sector personnel, has been set up to double trade between Sri Lanka and India.

Industry and commerce minister Rishad Bathiudeen made the proposal, which was then accepted by the cabinet.

Sri Lanka’s infamous Minister Wimal Weerawamsa has questioned whether the Secretary of the Judicial Services Commission had ‘attacked himself’, reported the Daily Mirror.

Speaking on Thursday the Minister stated that

“The facts surrounding the attack are rather suspicious”

Celebrating their launch as an affiliated body of the Conservative Party, British Tamil Conservatives held a drinks reception at the Tory Party Conference 2012 in Birmingham on Tuesday.

The BTC has become the first ethnic specific group to be affiliated to the Conservative Party in the UK.

Celebrating this success along side the BTC were a number of notable members of the Party including: the Party Chairman Grant Shapps, Cabinet Minister Theresa Villiers and the Vice President of the National Conservative Convention, Steve Bell, as well as many other MPs and MEPs.

The Commonwealth Business Council (CBC) has confirmed that it will hold its Commonwealth Business Forum in Sri Lanka next year.

The CEO of the CBC, Dr Mohan Kaul, is currently on a visit to Sri Lanka and called on president Mahinda Rajapakse on Wednesday, reported ColomboPage.

The Commonwealth Business Forum is planned for November, on the sidelines of the Commonwealth Heads of government Meeting (CHOGM).

The European Commission (EC) has warned that the Sri Lankan garment sector will face difficult times as the Sri Lankan Rupee's value continues to decline against the US dollar.

In an interview to TamilNet on Friday, following Frances Harrison's book launch, Alan Keenan of the ICG hoped that there would one day be an independent investigation into the events of 2009 and its aftermath, and that the "question of genocide should be included among those issues".

Asked about the ICG's view of the Tamil nation's right to have a sovereign state of their own, Keenan replied,

"I don’t think that the Crisis Group has ever rejected the right of the Tamil people to rule themselves in a sovereign fashion. I think what we have argued, in the current political context, that the demand for separation is not a wise one."

Asked to clarify what he meant by the current political context, Keenan explained:

"This is always a difficult judgement to make. I am not Tamil. I don’t live in Sri Lanka. But from an as dispassionate and as compassionate perspective as I can come to, the costs of pursuing a separate state to the Tamil people, given the lack of international support and given the virulent opposition that it would provoke among the Sinhalese, it would not be a wise thing. The costs, in terms of death, physical destruction, to the Tamil people themselves is not worth it especially given that the chances of succeeding are very small. That’s what I mean ‘it’s contextual’.

If it was a different political context, if there was a larger percentage of the Sinhala population which was potentially amenable or open to that, if they were more sympathetic, if the political dynamics among Sinhala dominated parties was more open, then that might well be something that could be pursued. But in the current context, it is a recipe for further violence and further conflagration that will just add up more dead bodies to the already enormous pile of dead bodies that Sri Lanka, particularly Tamils have suffered the last 30-40 years."

See here for sound clip of the interview.