JM Exclusive

By The Jaffna Monitor Staff JAFFNA, Nov. 4: On Tuesday, voters gave control of both the House and the Senate to Democrats, handing President Trump’s opponents the power to investigate his administration, control federal spending and block his nominees for the last two years of his term. Republicans had held 53 of the Senate’s 100 seats, and Democrats needed a net gain of four to win a majority. They gained seven: Ohio, Iowa, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maine, Kansas and Texas. Democrats hav

JAFFNA: Sri Lanka and India are close to signing an agreement to redevelop Kankesanthurai Port on the northern coast of the Jaffna peninsula, with Sri Lankan officials saying only cabinet approval in both countries now stands in the way. The expansion of Jaffna International Airport at Palaly, a few kilometres away, has made far less progress. Sri Lankan officials say the work is held up by disputes over land. A senior government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Jaffna Monito

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, Oct. 27 — A former member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam who served seven years in an Indian prison for conspiring to revive the separatist group was detained by Sri Lankan counterterrorism police on Monday, hours after India deported him to Colombo. Krishnakumar Kandasamy, 50, known within the organisation as Kanthan, was taken into custody by the Terrorism Investigation Division at Bandaranaike International Airport after arriving on a SriLankan Airlines flight on

By: Aruliniyan Mahalingam JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — Makkal Seyal, a civil society group in Jaffna, told reporters at the Jaffna Press Club on Sunday that it rejected “completely” the archaeologists’ latest report on the human remains found at Chemmani. In a Tamil statement, the group called the report one-sided and based on guesswork. It accused the authors of serving a state that has long suppressed minorities. Two days earlier, at the same place, groups representing families of the disappeared rej

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