Jaffna Monitor - Jaffna Monitor

Sri Lanka Wants Arjuna Mahendran Back. But It Has Yet to Satisfy Singapore’s Extradition Law.

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Sri Lanka is examining alternative legal avenues to bring Arjuna Mahendran, the former Central Bank governor at the center of the country's long-running Treasury bond scandal, back from Singapore to face criminal proceedings, the public security minister said, acknowledging that earlier efforts to secure his return had run into legal obstacles. Ananda Wijepala, the minister of public security and parliamentary affairs, said in an interview with a private television channel

JM Exclusive August 2026

Jaffna Monitor

Aug 27, 2026 — 5 min read

A Tuk-Tuk Policy Worthy of Tughlaq?

COLOMBO — Sri Lanka is considering barring anyone under the age of 40 from entering the three-wheeler passenger transport trade, a deputy minister said Sunday, reviving a proposal that a previous government abandoned as unlawful and unfair. Nalin Hewage, the deputy minister of vocational education, said the measure was intended to stop school-leavers from going directly into tuk-tuk driving and push them toward further study and skills training. “We expect to increase the age for entering the

JM Exclusive August 2026

Jaffna Monitor

Aug 23, 2026 — 5 min read

Will the Rains Fail in Jaffna? Two Forecasts Point in Opposite Directions

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — Shortly before midnight on Tuesday, one of the most widely followed voices on weather in northern Sri Lanka posted an alert in Tamil that spread quickly across the peninsula. Prof. N. Piratheeparajah, a professor of geography at the University of Jaffna and dean of its Faculty of Arts, wrote that a closely watched Indian Ocean climate index had fallen unexpectedly, that a powerful El Niño was responsible, and that the rains the North depends on in October and November could

JM Exclusive August 2026

Jaffna Monitor

Aug 19, 2026 — 5 min read

In Shenzhen, APEC Finds a Laboratory for People-First Technology

By: Sun Jin, Zhang Yu SHENZHEN — The drone hovered a moment above his open palm, then settled onto it. “Wow,” said Eduardo Pedrosa. The reaction was not on the schedule. The executive director of the APEC Secretariat was at Shenzhen Bay Culture Square on May 5, midway through the first of two working visits to the city that will host the 33rd APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting in November. The following day, onstage at the “Tech for People” Nanshan Day event, he waved his spectacles at the audienc

Economics August 2026

Jaffna Monitor

Aug 11, 2026 — 5 min read

Sri Lanka’s Judicial Age Fight Is About More Than Age

COLOMBO — There were men in the hall on the morning of 29 July who have spent much of the past decade attacking one another in public. Ali Sabry, justice and then foreign minister under Gotabaya Rajapaksa. Udaya Gammanpila, a minister of the same period who has fought much of Colombo’s political class in court and on air. M.A. Sumanthiran of the Ilankai Thamil Arasu Katchi, who spent a career litigating against the governments the other two sat in. And Lal Wijenayake, of the National People’s Po

Opinion & Analysis Exclusive

Jaffna Monitor

Aug 11, 2026 — 5 min read

One library that began a story

By: Shankari Chandran Editor's Note: As Australian High Commissioner Matthew Duckworth presents the complete collection of Shankari Chandran's novels to the Jaffna Public Library today, Jaffna Monitor republishes this essay by the Miles Franklin Award-winning Sri Lankan Tamil author, who reflects on the burning of the library, its enduring place in Tamil memory, and the lasting power of stories against erasure. My footsteps slow when I pass a library. Any library. I am pulled inwards, to i

Guest Column July 2026

Jaffna Monitor

Jul 14, 2026 — 5 min read

Sri Lanka Knows How to Fight Dengue. So Why Is the Government Still Losing?

COLOMBO / JAFFNA — On 6 July, the University of Moratuwa, one of the country's foremost engineering schools, sent its students home and moved teaching online for two weeks, after a cluster of more than fifty dengue infections spread through a campus where examinations were still underway. Several of those students, the university acknowledged, had sat their papers while feverish. It was the third campus disrupted in a matter of weeks. The University of the Visual and Performing Arts in Colombo h

JM Exclusive July 2026

Jaffna Monitor

Jul 13, 2026 — 6 min read

Nishan Canagarajah, Jaffna-Born Scholar, Is Knighted at Windsor Castle

More than four decades after he left a war-shadowed Jaffna on a scholarship, Professor Nishan Canagarajah knelt before King Charles III at Windsor Castle on Tuesday and rose a knight. During the investiture ceremony in Berkshire, the British monarch touched the shoulders of the kneeling academic with a sword to formally confer the honour of Knight Bachelor. Sir Nishan, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leicester, was named in the 2026 King's New Year Honors for his "inestimable contribution

July 2026 Monitor Memo

Jaffna Monitor

Jul 8, 2026 — 3 min read