Since Gotabaya Rajapaksa took office as President, he “has bent the democracy to its breaking point” as Sri Lanka slides further into military totalitarianism, writes Laxmanan Sanjeev for Foreign Policy.

A Tamil man has been seriously injured and hospitalised following a bomb attack in his home in Mannar last night.

Semalai Santhiyogu, a 59-year-old father-of-two, was admitted with serious injuries to Mannar Hospital, following the incident.

Jaffna University senior law lecturer, Dr Kumaravadivel Guruparan, has resigned "with utmost pain and sadness" after he was barred from private legal practice last year. 

In his resignation letter, Guruparan wrote that he felt "compelled to resign" after the Council of the University of Jaffna barred him from practising as a lawyer at the instigation of the Sri Lankan military. The move is seen as a direct reprisal for his representation of victims in the Navatkuli Habeas Corpus case, related to the disappearance of 24 Tamil youths from military custody in 1996.

The German Embassy in Colombo provided a grant of nearly Rs 4 million to a Sri Lankan NGO to support their project addressing Sexual and Gender Based Violence (SGBV) in Sri Lanka - which will benefit around 1500 women and children in areas such as Batticaloa and Jaffna.

Local Tamils in a village in Mullaitivu have been instructed by Sri Lankan officials to leave their land, despite having it returned to them from Sri Lankan military occupation. 

The locals have questioned “who they are trying to give this land to” and why they are “lifting us from the land we protested on the streets to reclaim.”

R Sampanthan, the current leader of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), announced that Indian President Narendra Modi is “standing behind us (TNA)” in a recent interview to Tamil media earlier this month. 

Sri Lanka has appointed a new navy commander, as promotions of officers close to Sri Lankan president and accused war criminal Gotabaya Rajapaksa continue.

Rear Admiral Nishantha Ulugetenne was promoted to the rank of Vice Admiral in a ceremony attended by Buddhist monks and other senior naval figures, the official Navy website reported. 

A man has been arrested for allegedly being in possession of a sword and having connection to a string of sword violence related assaults dating back to last year.

The man was arrested on Tuesday night by the Jaffna police for allegedly having connection to a sword violence incident on the 9^th July in Jaffna. He was also accused of having connection to sword violence incidents from 2019.

Police officers seized a sword, iron rods and a cricket stump from the man.  

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi extolled the virtues of the classical Tamil literary and philosophical text Thirukkural in a tweet on Thursday.

In a trio of tweets in English and Tamil, the Hindu-nationalist leader heaped praise on the wisdom of Thiruvalluvar, the saint who authored the entire corpus of 1,330 pithy moral precepts, and said he “hoped”  youngsters across India would read the text.

The tweet in English reads,

A Sinhala nationalist monk has lodged a complaint with Sri Lanka’s Human Rights Commission (HRC), after the leader of the extremist Buddhist nationalist group Bodu Bala Sena had his account blocked from Facebook due to complaints of racism.

Athuraliye Rathana, a Buddhist monk, parliamentarian and founder of the Sinhala nationalist Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU), complained to the HRC that BBS leader Gnanasara was not a racist.