GSP Plus: Story of emperor without clothes At Temple Trees on Esala Poya Day, it was a star-studded event. President Mahinda Rajapaksa sat together with the country's leading film idols, the heroes, heroines and villains of the Sinhala screen to hear religious sermons from the Buddhist clergy.
There was a great sense of elation in the security establishment, quite justifiably, over the Army's re-capture last Wednesday of the coastal village of Vidattaltivu in the Mannar sector.
It is a commonplace among commentators writing on the progress (or lack of it) of our regional organisation, SAARC, to compare it with our older cousin ASEAN and even with the European Union. Such comparisons do make SAARC seem the poor relation.
The degree of success or otherwise of the strike last week and its motives and political agenda will be discussed by many from several different standpoints. It is to a parallel discussion on the economics of the wage demands that we must turn here.
At the height of the US-USSR Cold War in the 1960s, the UN Security Council was a vibrant political battleground for the Soviets and the Americans.
The veto was the preferred weapon of war as the US and the then Soviet Union kept pummeling each other by vetoing key Security Council resolutions to protect their national interests and their political and military allies worldwide.
