Bidding Trumps or No Trumps?
I remember that time many years ago when I first learned to play this strange card game called Bridge. I was musing recently about what I was told by my Bridge teacher. He was actually one of my batchmates at varsity who spent more time in the canteen playing card games than he did at [...]
The global South’s pandemic path to self-reliance
MELBOURNE – COVID-19 continues to have a devastating impact on public health and to rattle the global economy with structural shocks. The pandemic has now killed more than one million people, while the International Monetary Fund estimates that global GDP will shrink by 4.4 percent in 2020. But, strange as it may seem, the current [...]
Clean suit, empty pocket
Astrologers would surely have seen significance in the coincidence of three political events of the Pohottuwa party on Tuesday: The first anniversary of the executive presidency of Gotabaya Rajapaksa, birthday of his brother and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa and the presentation of the Government’s 2021 budget, which is expected to transform all those grandiose visions [...]
A potential weapon kills more than 1.5 million worldwide–without a single shot being fired
UNITED NATIONS, (IPS) — The world’s major military powers exercise their dominance largely because of their massive weapons arsenals, including sophisticated fighter planes, drones, ballistic missiles, warships, battle tanks, heavy artillery—and nuclear weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). But the sudden surge in the coronavirus pandemic in the US and Europe has resurrected the lingering question [...]
Militarisation and hi-tech undermine health experts
A spontaneous uproar has erupted over the Government sidelining the health sector and accrediting itself and the military only with successfully controlling the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is no gainsaying that the health sector fully threw itself to the daunting task of controlling the first wave of Covid-19. It was able to [...]
Exodus of scientists from research institutes to universities – A national malady
There is a tendency for qualified and experienced research officers to leave the three key research institutes – the Tea Research Institute (TRI), the Rubber Research (RRI) and the Coconut Research Institute (CRI) after obtaining post-graduate qualifications, preferably at the PhD level, to join national universities, leaving a huge void in the research institutes. Obviously, [...]