Six Tamil and Muslim parties have agreed to establish a common platform to press Colombo on a new constitution, the long-delayed provincial council elections and unresolved land disputes, in what its architects call the first collective political network of the North-East, Malaiyaha and Muslim peoples in decades.

Nearly a decade after Sri Lanka established the Office on Missing Persons, a new ITJP report says the body has failed to investigate enforced disappearances, failed to use existing state records and left families trapped in another cycle of bureaucracy and denial.

The National People's Power's most senior Tamil figures have dismissed the newly formed six-party platform of Tamil and Muslim parties as doomed, corrupt and Colombo-bound, with a Jaffna MP branding its members "brokers", in a response that left untouched the platform's three demands, every one of them a pledge from the NPP's own manifesto.

Eelam Tamils took their case for justice to a multicultural peace festival in the Piedmont town of Valdilana this month, mounting an exhibition on the Tamil genocide, and drew a pledge from one of Italy's foremost peace campaigners, who participants say committed to bringing Tamil history and the genocide into Italian schools nationally.

All 21 prisoners killed during the deadly violence at Negombo Prison were remand detainees awaiting trial and had not been convicted of any offence, according to Sri Lanka’s Department of Prisons.

Footage obtained by the Tamil Guardian appears to show Sri Lankan soldiers selling large quantities of vegetables grown on occupied Tamil land to a Keells collection centre in Jaffna, directly contradicting the deputy defence minister's assurance to parliament, just days earlier, that the military farms this land only to feed itself.

Displaced Tamil landowners of Valikamam North protested at Palaly Junction for a fourth week running, demanding the return of land held by the military for 36 years, as police barred the mostly elderly demonstrators from even erecting a shelter against Jaffna's punishing mid-July sun, days after the government confirmed the land would never be given back.

Former Sri Lankan state minister and paramilitary leader Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan, widely known as Pillayan, has been further remanded until 24 July as the Criminal Investigation Department continues its probe into five killings in Batticaloa in 2008.

The death toll from the deadly clashes at Negombo Prison has risen to 31 after two more prison officers died while receiving treatment at the National Hospital in Colombo.

A fresh attempt to acquire Tamil land in Vadamaradchi East for reported Sri Lankan military use was suspended on Thursday after the landowner, local residents and activists intervened to block the survey.

Sri Lanka's deputy defence minister has told parliament that land held within the Palaly High Security Zone deemed vital to national security will not be returned to its Tamil owners, and that a further 1,661 acres are to be permanently acquired for the military, with still more sought to expand the airport, even as displaced families across the North-East enter their third month of weekly protests demanding their land back.

A Tibetan independence activist has died after setting himself on fire outside the United Nations headquarters in New York, in a act of protest that Tibetan exile groups described as an appeal for Tibetan independence and unity.

Relatives and clergy have gathered at St Peter's Church in Navaly to mark 31 years since the Sri Lankan Air Force dropped 13 bombs on the church and a neighbouring Hindu temple where hundreds of Tamil civilians, urged by the military itself to shelter in places of worship, had taken refuge, killing 147, an atrocity for which no Sri Lankan government has ever accepted responsibility.