War against plastic waste hampered by don’t-care public
The government is fighting a battle against companies making and using non- recyclable “sili-sili” bags with one hand tied behind its back by the public and local bodies that couldn’t care less about the plastic’s damage to the environment. This week the Central Environment Authority (CEA) began a concerted campaign to stamp out the use [...]
Tech-savvy Sri Lankan turns heads
A mobile technology Application created by Dilan de Silva, a Sri Lankan-born, New Jersey-based tech entrepreneur took sal on and industry professionals by storm at the recently concluded Premiere Orlando International beauty event in Orlando, Florida. Dilan, owner of WebAppClouds LLC, introduced his trailblazing cloud-based APP known as SalonCloudPLus at this biggest ever beauty trade [...]
Facelift for Jawatte mosque
The new extension to Colombo’s Jawatte mosque which is more than sevendecades old was declared open on Thursday by mosque senior Hussain Cassim and Senior Minister A.H.M. Fowzie during a ceremony attended by the congregation. The facelift for the mosque carried out with donations from well-wishers and the mosque jamath. Pic by M.A. Pushpa Kumara
Opera singer with a mission to move hearts
Sabina Cvilak has two loves. And grey eyes flashing behind an easy laugh she will tell you that you don’t make her chose between her music and her horses. The Slovenian-born lyric soprano, currently visiting Sri Lanka for a performance with Rohan de Silva and the De Lanerolle Brothers, was born with a love for [...]
A diet of ants, slugs and other bugs gave humans a bigger brain
Working out how to survive on a diet of insects caused our brains to grow, and led to use evolving, researchers have claimed. They say the constant challenge of finding food may have spurred the development of bigger brains and higher-level cognitive functions in the ancestors of humans and other primates. Researchers studied capuchin monkeys [...]
How the CIA secretly published Dr Zhivago
Boris Pasternak’s famous novel Doctor Zhivago remained unpublished in the USSR until 1988, because of its implicit criticism of the Soviet system. But for the same reason, the CIA wanted Soviets to read the book, and arranged the first-ever publication in Russian. In early September 1958 Dutch secret service agent Joop van der Wilden brought [...]
Indian women design ‘anti-rape’ jeans
Two Indian women have designed a line of ‘anti-rape’ jeans that send a distress signal to local police who then can locate and help the victim. It comes after a string of brutal attacks in the country which have horrified the world. Diksha Pathak, 21, and Anjali Srivastava, 23, from India’s northern Varanasi city, said [...]
Chimpanzees go ape for Indian music
Chimpanzees like to listen to music – but have very specific tastes, researchers have found. While preferring silence to music from the West, chimpanzees like to listen to the different rhythms of music from Africa and India, researchers found. The research is the first to discover primates have a preference for music, according to the [...]
WW III: The return of the sleepwalkers
PARIS – On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were murdered in Sarajevo – triggering a series of bad decisions that culminated in World War I. A century later, the world is again roiled by conflict and uncertainty, exemplified in the Middle [...]
Eating broccoli can help asthma sufferers
We’ve all been told eating green vegetables is an important part of our diet and can boost general health and development, but the advice could have even better results than first thought. Eating one or two cups of steamed broccoli every day could be a new treatment to help asthmatics, according to Melbourne researchers. The [...]
Iraq’s top Shi’ite cleric calls for prime minister to be chosen by Tuesday
BAGHDAD (Reuters)- The most influential Shi’ite cleric in Iraq called on the country’s leaders on Friday to choose a prime minister within the next four days, a dramatic political intervention that could hasten the end of Nuri al-Maliki’s eight year rule. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who commands unswerving loyalty from many Shi’ites in Iraq and [...]
Thai coup leader denies conspiracy with protesters
BANGKOK, June 28 (AFP) -Thailand’s junta-leading Army Chief has dismissed allegations he plotted to seize power for years before May’s coup, issuing an apparent rebuke to the leader of the protests that crippled the former government. “It is not true” General Prayut Chan-O-Cha said, addressing accusations that he had discussed uprooting the divisive Shinawatra clan [...]
China’s Xi calls for stronger frontier defences: Xinhua
BEIJING, June 28 (AFP)- President Xi Jinping said China should strengthen its frontier defences on land and sea, state media reported today amid territorial disputes with neighbouring nations which have accused Beijing of being increasingly aggressive in pressing its claims. Xi made the remarks at a “national meeting” on Friday also attended by Premier Li [...]
Gertrude of Arabia, the woman who invented Iraq
She came into Baghdad after months in one of the world’s most forbidding deserts, a stoic, diminutive 45-year-old English woman with her small band of men. She had been through lawless lands, held at gunpoint by robbers, taken prisoner in a city that no Westerner had seen for 20 years. It was a hundred years [...]
Countdown to Mars
The spacecraft it is hoped will take man to Mars has passed its first parachute tests with flying colours. Nasa’s Orion spacecraft landed gently using its parachutes after being shoved out of a military jet at 35,000 feet. It is hoped the craft will take astronauts to an asteroid in 2018, before eventually helping ferry [...]