Aruliniyan Mahalingam

By Aruliniyan Mahalingam JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — The letter ran to a few hundred words, but its message to the President of Sri Lanka was unambiguous: lawyers in Jaffna, the country's Tamil heartland, believed that the executive branch had reached into the judiciary and moved a judge who had displeased it. That document — an appeal from the Jaffna Bar Association to President Anura Kumara Dissanayake over the abrupt transfer of High Court Judge A.G. Alexraja — was precisely the kind of accusation

By Aruliniyan Mahalingam On the morning of Dec. 17, 2024, W.S. Sathyananda, a Special Grade officer of the Sri Lanka Administrative Service with nearly three decades of experience, sent a brief WhatsApp message to his superior. Having just reported for duty as Additional Secretary at the Ministry of Transport, Highways, Ports, and Civil Aviation, he requested an appointment to pay a courtesy call. The response he received that afternoon would lead to a Supreme Court case — W.S. Sathyananda v.

By Aruliniyan Mahalingam For six years, a woman from the Pommaveli area of Jaffna — known to police and lawyers alike as one of the district’s most persistent narcotics dealers — had walked in and out of courtrooms, exploiting successive bail hearings to remain free and, according to legal sources, continue trafficking. She had been arrested in June 2020 for possession of 1.475 grams of heroin. Six years of adjournments, applications, and legal manoeuvring produced no conviction. On May 21, 20

In early April, a passenger aboard the Dutch expedition cruise ship MV Hondius fell ill with fever and respiratory distress while crossing the South Atlantic. He died on April 11. No tests were conducted. His body was removed from the vessel, and the ship continued its voyage. By early May, health authorities across three continents were scrambling to trace the movements of 147 people from 23 countries who had shared the same cabins and recirculated air. On 2 May 2026, WHO received a formal not

ANURADHAPURA, Sri Lanka — She was eleven years old, by her own account, when her mother first brought her to the private residential quarters inside one of the holiest Buddhist precincts in the world. She was fourteen when she told police what happened there. The man she named is Pallegama Hemarathana Thero, 71, the Atamasthanadhipathi — Chief Prelate and Custodian of the Eight Sacred Sites of Anuradhapura, and the senior-most administrative authority over the Sri Maha Bodhi: the sacred fig tr