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Home » ColumnsRanil’s social media Q&A: The gentleman and ungentlemanly politics
On Friday, President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s social media team held a Q&A with him. It was titled “#AskRanil.” Social media users were able to directly send questions to the president via YouTube, Facebook, X and TikTok using the hashtag #AskRanil. The president answered a variety of questions directed at him over the 40-minute programme. One of [...]
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My dear Deshabandu, I thought I should write to you at this difficult time when you have been told to step away from the top job in the khaki uniform. Being the respectful and law-abiding citizen that you are, I hope you will respect that order, and stay away from duties though some desperately want [...]
Tennakoon to be the IGP or not to be: Parliament turns into verbal battleground
By Sandun Jayawardana In a statement that will reverberate throughout the country as it prepares for a presidential election, Prime Minister Dinesh Gunawardena informed Parliament on Friday of the government’s refusal to accept the Supreme Court’s interim order preventing the Inspector General of Police (IGP) Deshabandu Tennakoon from functioning in his post. The Premier strongly [...]
Outmigration: Severe loss of human capital undermines economic development capacity
The global summit on human capital was held in Colombo recently at a time when the country was experiencing a severe erosion of human capital as never before. This unprecedented large exodus of workers would lead to the weakening of the country’s development capacity and be a setback to social development. Six decades The continuous [...]
Sri Lanka’s constitutional council, deserted at birth, now with quarreling parents?
As Sri Lanka faces an unexpected constitutional crisis over this week’s ‘interim order’ by a three judge bench of the Supreme Court ‘restraining’ the Inspector General of Police (IGP) from ‘exercising the powers, functions and responsibilities of office’ until the final determination of several fundamental rights challenges, it is not difficult to envisage the Wickremesinghe [...]
Good news, bad news and the worst still to come
“Subha aranchi” screamed the two words in posters plastered all over Colombo and elsewhere a day or two before government front runners walked heads held high like the heroic Nelson after the battle of Waterloo. They had kicked Sri Lanka’s accumulated debt into the long grass so that years later others not guilty of such [...]
Speaker under parliamentary fire for distorting CC ruling on the IGP
President to ignore Supreme Court request ‘to appoint an acting IGP’ The instant IGP Deshabandu Tennakoon learned at the Bambalapitiya Police Station, where he had arrived to supervise security arrangements for an event to be attended by the President, that the Supreme Court had temperorily stripped him of his post and denied him the trappings [...]
To back Ranil or not: Decision tomorrow at SLPP politburo meeting
Wickremesinghe writes to Mahinda and leaders of other parties, seeking support for his independent candidature Namal accuses Ranil of trying to divide the party; backs businessman Dhammika Perera as candidate Tamil people given freedom to decide on whom to support; common candidate unlikely By Our Political Editor A crisis is brewing in the Sri [...]
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