Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan alias Pillayan has been authorised to attend the inaugural parliamentary session on Thursday 20^th August as well as future sessions affirmed the Batticaloa High Court today, despite him currently being held in custody over the 2005 Christmas Day murder of Tamil National Alliance parliamentarian Joseph Pararajasingham.

A Sinhala Buddhist monk has lodged a complaint at the Swiss Embassy in Colombo, claiming that rival extremist monks abducted and assaulted him as the clergy tussle over a seat in Sri Lanka’s parliament.

Monks from the Our Power of Peoples Party (OPPP) are currently engaged in a dispute over the sole National List seat that the party is entitled to in Sri Lanka’s parliament. 

Arambepola Ratanasara, a member of the OPPP claimed he was “kidnapped and held illegally” by Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara, another monk who is the general secretary of the Sinhala supremacist Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) organisation.

A two-thirds majority in the Sri Lankan parliament does not mean the ruling Rajapaksa regime can ignore the concerns of the Tamil people, declared Tamil National Alliance (TNA) leader R Sampanthan. 

Sri Lanka has ordered the rationing of electricity throughout the week after power cuts plunged the island into darkness following yet another failure of the Norochcholai power plant.

Excavations of a site in Jaffna where human skeletal remains and clothes were found last week are to commence to determine whether it is yet another mass grave site, reports The Island. 

Writing in Foreign Policy magazine, Professor Neil DeVotta warns of “Rajapaksa rule well into the future” and possible anti-Muslim pogroms “in the days ahead unless the international community bands together to protect them”. 

The Sri Lankan army blocked local farmers in Mullaitivu from assessing and clearing their land to cultivate it for maize and rice, earlier this month.

Sri Lanka’s Defence Secretary, and accused war criminal, Kamal Gunaratne, has delivered a speech in which he vowed that he would not permit room for separatism or extremism in the North-East as well as tackling “separatist” voices abroad.

Photo of Justice Minister Ali Sabry with President Gotabya Rajapaksa

Sri Lanka’s newly appointed Foreign Secretary, retired Navy admiral Jayanath Colombage, has announced that he would re-evaluate Sri Lanka’s foreign policy which had been orientated towards the western hemisphere.

Former Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena vowed to “dedicate himself towards developing the country and building a prosperous economy as part of the new government under President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s leadership” at a media briefing in Polannaruwa, last week.

^{Photograph: Ministry of Foreign Relations, Sri Lanka}

Sri Lanka’s former president Chandrika Kumaratunga declared that she “doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry” when looking at the state of the  Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), in post-election comments where she praised Mahinda Rajapaksa as a “strong leader”.