_{^{Army officers carry out milk production procedures - Photo: Army.lk}}

Sri Lankan army officers have started their own fresh milk production, which the army states is another project in becoming “self-sufficient in essential commodities”, according to the army’s official website.

Standard and Poor's announced a downgrade to Sri Lanka’s credit score this week, in another blow to the economy that sees the country on par with Argentina, Mozambique and Belize.

“Sri Lanka’s economy is suffering another major blow in 2020,” the ratings company said. “We lowered our ratings on Sri Lanka based on our assessment that risks to debt servicing capacity have risen, as the government’s access to external financing has become increasingly dependent on favorable business, economic, and financial conditions.”

The decision of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) to abstain on the passing of Sri Lanka’s budget last week “was already taken in New Delhi and communicated to the TNA leadership”, according to a report in the Sunday Times this morning.

TNA parliamentarians, and the TMTK’s C V Wigneswaran, all abstained on a vote on the final reading of the 2021 Budget which was passed on Thursday. The budget brings a host of nationalist policies, including a digital protectionist tax.

From the North-East, the Tamil National People’s Front was the only major Tamil party to vote against it.

Protests by Mullaitivu fishermen intensified this month as businesses carried out a hartal and staged a demonstration in front of the District Secretariat, as they demanded an end to encroachment by Indian trawler boats.

The murder case of the late senior journalist, Lasantha Wickrematunge was postponed yet again to June 4^th 2021.

The former editor of Sunday Leader, was critical of the Rajapaksa regime that was in power at the time, and spoke up against the government’s war efforts against the Tamils in the North-East. Wickrematunge was vocal against the abundant occurrence of human rights abuses by the reigning government and was assassinated on January 8^th, 2009.

Udaya Gammanpila, a government spokesman, has claimed that there are no Tamil political prisoners as “those arrested in the North and East are detained under the Prevention of Terrorism Act on terrorism charges and cannot be deemed as political prisoners”.

Speaking in the House of Commons, Nigel Adams, UK Minister for Asia at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development, expressed concerns over Sri Lanka’s policy of mandatory cremation.

This comes shortly after the Sri Lankan government appointed a committee to review the decision and ruled in favour of mandatory cremation. Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court further dismissed a Fundamental Rights petition against the policy.

Sri Lanka’s foreign minister Dinesh Gunawardena met with both Britain’s and Canada’s diplomats this week, where he reportedly “addressed the mutual concern of security of countries, particularly in the context of the increasingly visible activities in the past few weeks by non-state actors engaged in glorification of terrorist acts of the LTTE”.

Sri Lankan army officials have seized ancient religious statues worth 1.5 million Sri Lankan rupees, in Jaffna.

A 68-year-old Lord Murugan statue and three peacock statues were among the religious statues found hidden in a pond near the Vaddukoddai Sanganai Odakarai Nagathambiran temple, last month

Sri Lankan police officers threatened to quarantine Tamil families of the disappeared as they made their way to a protest in Batticaloa earlier today, in an attempt to stop the demonstration from happening on International Human Rights Day.

Relatives of the forcibly disappeared were making their way to a protest in the Eastern province, when police officers attempted to stop them at the Batticaloa bus station.