By Aruliniyan Mahalingam JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — On 27 November 1825, cholera killed two small girls at the American mission at Uduvil, north of Jaffna town. Harriet Maria Winslow was three years and nine months old. Sarah Jane Spaulding was five. They died on the same day, in the same place, and a tablet at the mission church commemorates the Winslow child and her two siblings. Cholera returned to the peninsula in 1838. The Rev. John M. S. Perry, a missionary of the American Board, died of it on 1

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka, Oct. 21, 2026 — Nearly two-thirds of the 574 people exhumed from the Sittupatti Hindu cemetery at Chemmani, on the outskirts of Jaffna, were infants or children, according to the third interim report of the archaeologists directing the excavation. The report concludes that the site bears greater similarity to formal burial practices than to clandestine burial sites documented elsewhere in the world. Its authors also say their evidence cannot establish how the dead came to be t

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — The figure is small and roughly shaped: a human form pressed out of clay, with a round head, a narrow trunk and short limbs, laid on a strip of banana leaf. Beside it, on a woven mat, sits a basket of red flowers. The photograph, released on Wednesday by followers of a Buddhist monk, shows the effigy used in a ceremony held on Tuesday night in Viharamahadevi Park, Colombo’s largest public park. There, exorcists brought from the southern district of Matara performed a Mahaso

In early October, Sweety Akter called her parents in Tangail from a prison in Saudi Arabia. It was one of her monthly calls. She said nothing about a sentence. In one of those last calls, her father later told The Daily Star, she had said she might be released within two months. On Sunday, 11 October, Nazrul Islam made his weekly call to his parents in Brahmanbaria. It lasted two to two and a half minutes. His father says Nazrul told him he was in some trouble. His mother says he gave no sign o