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Home » ColumnsKalkudah distillery: Company puts jobless graduates in high spirits
Kalkudah distillery: Company puts jobless graduates in high spirits Protests are growing over plans by a private company to set up a distillery at Kalkudah in the Batticaloa district, but this week the company gave what is seen as a double-distilled twist to defend this controversial distillery. It started a campaign to claim that the [...]
Package of Joint Ventures with India in MoU signed in Delhi
Special emphasis on Trinco tank farms: Upper tanks to be developed by joint venture, lower ones to be given to India on 50-year lease New Delhi insists new deal has big advantages for Sri Lanka, 2003 agreement gave entire tank farm to Indian Oil on lease Poaching issue persists, Modi Govt. says steps being taken [...]
Changing boots
My dear Field Marshal, I really didn’t think I would have to write to you again so soon but here you are, in the news once again. The entire country is talking about a new appointment for you after Maithri is said to have suggested this. In keeping with the trend of this government however, [...]
Loosening the debt trap and resolving the foreign debt crisis
Resolving the foreign debt trap discussed last Sunday is a mammoth task as the annual debt servicing costs are very heavy in the next few years. Meeting the impending debt repayments for this year and next year are immensely difficult. The debt repayment of as much as US$4 billion in 2019 is unthinkable at present. [...]
Skullduggery, secrecy and the counter-terror draft act
In the chaotic merry-go-round characterizing the drafting of Sri Lanka’s proposed Counter-Terror Act (CTA), the periodic surfacing of one version followed by another has given rise to unexpected horrors. Each time that a new draft emerges or should I rather say, is ‘extracted’ with great pain out of a process gripped by skullduggery and secrecy, [...]
Course change mooted for YP after near national meltdown
Manic Monday sends Government alarm bells ringing on the eve of the New Year dawn, Mahinda Rajapaksa grandly declared that he would topple the Government in 2017. In his own New Year message to the nation delivered through a group of Colombo-based foreign correspondents over a breakfast of crispy hoppers, he announced with aplomb: “I [...]
Politicians heal thyselves and those doctors too
That tragic and unfortunate happening at Meethotamulla which brought death and destruction to a poverty-stricken part of the country’s capital during a festive occasion saw politicians of most hues avoid a visit to the scene but offer long-distance commiserations. Whether it was the stench of death and debris that now seems so foreign to politicians [...]