July 2026

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — Sri Lankan police have assured a Tamil journalist that officers will no longer ask reporters to disclose their confidential sources after the country's largest journalists' union raised the issue with the Inspector General of Police, the journalist said. The assurance was given on Sunday to Murukaiya Thamilselvan, a Kilinochchi-based journalist, during a meeting at the office of an Assistant Superintendent of Police in Jaffna. Officers there recorded a detailed statement fro

COLOMBO — Sri Lanka's government is reviewing tens of thousands of acres of protected land in the eastern district of Trincomalee with the aim of returning land, or providing alternative plots, to people who lived there before 1985, Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya told Parliament on Wednesday. Responding to questions from Kugathasan, an opposition lawmaker representing Trincomalee District from the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Katchi (ITAK), Ms. Amarasuriya said the initiative forms part of a permanen

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

COLOMBO — Sri Lanka's Parliament has weathered no-confidence motions, a sovereign default, and, on one notorious day in 2018, chairs and chili powder flung across the chamber floor. This week, the latest parliamentary battle was over who should sit next to whom. Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam, leader of the All Ceylon Tamil Congress, has formally petitioned the Speaker to move the seat of Archchuna Ramanathan, the independent lawmaker immediately to his left, after accusing him of repeated abuse and