5th Column
Home » ColumnsHurting the patient
My dear Nalinda, I thought I should write to you this week, both because you are the spokesman for the government and also because what you have said recently has suddenly become controversial and the subject of much debate. As you may have already realised in your new role, any publicity is not good publicity! [...]
Million-rupee questions on candidate buying
Though it is two months now since the general election, some scandals relating to certain parties and their candidates are coming to light. It has transpired that higher-ups of a newly formed political party that contested the general elections had offered Rs. 4 million to a teacher to contest the election from their party ticket [...]
Heat over NPP promises made on campaign trail but not kept
By Sandun Jayawardana The gulf between what the National People’s Power (NPP) said on the campaign trail and what it is saying now in government, was repeatedly highlighted by the opposition when Parliament debated the country’s “Mid-Year Fiscal Position Report – 2024.” The government drew attention to the sacrifices made by ordinary people in the [...]
The realisation of the ‘Clean Sri Lanka’ socio-economic transformation
Never before in the nation’s post-independence history has a Sri Lankan leader, a president or prime minister, unveiled a visionary programme for the nation’s holistic transformation as President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has done with the launch of the “Clean Sri Lanka” campaign on January 1. However, the realisation of the government’s visionary socio-economic transformation is [...]
Warning signs; the NPP’s ‘Orwellian’ inclinations
There is an intriguing question in the air. Is the creeping self-sabotage of Sri Lanka’s National Peoples’ Power (NPP) Government due to innate political clumsiness in power, the sycophantic antics of minions appointed to office who are characteristically unable to hold the chairs that they inhabit or a dangerous tendency to lean towards ‘Orwellian’ control? [...]
Donald Trump fires warning shots to take over Canada and Greenland
Next Sunday, the world will awake to behold Trump in the White House Still on the outskirts of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC, Donald Trump fired a round of warning shots like an old Wild West gunslinger, sounding the signal that he’ll be back in town soon. Just a Sunday away from regaining the much-coveted [...]
Rulers promise freedom of speech, but Peradeniya students under siege
It was not too long ago that the Health Minister, who wears several official hats, promised the new government would not interfere with the media’s freedom of expression. His intention no doubt was to disabuse the minds of some media institutions, big and small, that they would not perish under the governmental pressure of a [...]