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COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Former Sri Lankan cricket captain Aravinda de Silva told a Colombo magistrate on Tuesday that he personally arranged bail guarantors and sent Rs. 500,000 in cash to secure the release of Kapila Chandrasena, the former SriLankan Airlines chief executive found dead at his Kollupitiya residence last week, and that he repeatedly tried to reassure Mr. Chandrasena in the final hours of his life that a fresh arrest warrant was "a small matter" that could be resolved. Mr. de Silva

A May Day speech in which President Dissanayake told supporters they would be able to applaud a pending court ruling has triggered a formal international complaint — and exposed a constitutional provision that criminalises executive interference in judicial proceedings. COLOMBO — Twenty-four Sri Lankan opposition members of parliament have filed a formal complaint with the United Nations Human Rights Council's Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers, alleging that President

When the governing council of the University of Peradeniya voted in May 2020 to discard the findings of its own formal disciplinary inquiry, which had found a senior professor guilty of cyberstalking, repeated physical touching and sustained emotional abuse of a junior colleague under his academic supervision, it may have assumed the matter was over. Dr. W. A. M. Udari L. Abeyasinghe, the junior colleague at the centre of the complaint and a dentist and lecturer at the same faculty, had already

Dear Vijay, Heartiest congratulations on becoming the chief minister of Tamil Nadu! Now that you start governing one of India’s biggest and economically most developed states, plenty of problems, small and big, will crop up. You already mentioned the state’s fiscal mess after taking the oath of office. Unlike most chief ministers in India, you will be confronted now and then by matters affecting or involving a neighbouring country: Sri Lanka. This is where you need to exercise extreme cautio

CHENNAI — Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam, leader of Sri Lanka’s Tamil National People’s Front (TNPF), has formally urged newly sworn-in Tamil Nadu Chief Minister C. Joseph Vijay to declare May 18 as Mullivaikkal Genocide Remembrance Day through an official resolution in the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly. Mr. Ponnambalam sent the letter following Mr. Vijay's swearing-in on May 10 as Tamil Nadu's ninth chief minister — the first to lead a government formed by Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam, the party Mr.

By M.R. Narayan Swamy Just 824 days after he took to politics, Tamil superstar Vijay, nee C. Joseph Vijay, on Sunday, took oath as Tamil Nadu’s new chief minister amid cheers and wild whistling by thousands of supporters, and immediately vowed to provide “a new era” to one of India’s biggest states now saddled with a huge debt. As a packed Jawaharlal Nehru stadium roared in approval, Vijay, 51, was administered the oath of office and secrecy by Governor Rajendra Vishwanath Arlekar, who, until

By M.R. Narayan Swamy After five days of tense, suspense-packed drama, Tamil superstar Vijay on Saturday was finally on the path to becoming the new chief minister of Tamil Nadu as he marshaled majority support before Governor Rajendra Vishwanath Arlekar. But Vijay supporters admitted that the 51-year-old actor-turned-politician had learnt some invaluable lessons in politics as his Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) desperately scouted for support since May 4 after falling short of a legislative m

CHENNAI — Whether one supported actor-turned-politician Vijay or not, almost everyone agreed on one thing: he had done the impossible. In a state where political power had rotated between two Dravidian parties for nearly six decades, Vijay emerged out of the blue, entered the political spectrum, and led his fledgling Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam to 108 seats, making it the single largest party in Tamil Nadu’s 234-member assembly. It was, by any measure, a democratic earthquake. Even his critics a