#AskMR: Twitter Q&A, January 2017
Photo by AP, via The first #AskMR Twitter Q&A, conducted when former President Mahinda Rajapaksa was in New York attending the UN sessions in September 2013, was an unmitigated disaster. A complete…
Year: 2017
Forecast for 2017: Sepali Kottegoda
This is the second in a series of video interviews forecasting what 2017 will have in store across different sectors, including women’s rights, economics, and arts and culture. Sepali Kottegoda, Executive Director of Women…
Adventures in Print Journalism
Photo by REUTERS/Philip Brown 2016 was, among other things, a year conspicuous for illustrating the successes of several years of political rebranding, at least in the West. Over the past few years,…
Tribute to Justice Weeramantry: A world free of war, hate and prejudice
The sad demise of Sri Lankabhimanya Justice C. G. Weeramantry, one of the world’s eminent jurists and a legal scholar par excellence at the age of 90 on January 5 leaves a…
Forecast for 2017: Janeen Fernando
This is the first in a series of video interviews forecasting what 2017 will have in store across different sectors, including women’s rights, economics, and arts and culture. Janeen Fernando from Verité Research speaks…
Remembering Lasantha, eight years on
Photo via Way back in 2007, when I was assigned one of the biggest investigative stories I were to ever undertake, our editor Lasantha Wickrematunge sent me a text message with a…
Press conference of Consultations Task Force (CTF): Full video
We broadcast live almost the complete press conference of the Consultations Task Force (CTF), held on 5th January 2017 (Thursday) at the Media Ministry auditorium around the launch of its final report,…
The Regressive Second Year
Photograph via On January 8th 2015, Lankans voted not only to elect a new president but also to transform governance. The mandate Maithripala Sirisena received two years ago was not a personal…
The Curse of the Obstinate Patriarch
Today marks the second anniversary of the victory of Maithripala Sirisena as the President of Sri Lanka at the 8th January 2015 Sri Lankan Presidential Election. And the second anniversary of the…
Trump’s Unrealpolitik
NEW YORK – Some in the United States have praised President-elect Donald Trump for his supposed realism. He will do what is right for America, they argue, without getting caught up in…
Survivalist and Irrepressible: The Two Faces of the Sri Lankan Media
Introduction The past decade produced two critical moments of transition in Sri Lanka. On 19 May 2009, a 30-year war came to a brutal end with the defeat of the Liberation Tigers…
Understanding the current regime
Soon it will be two years since the election of President Sirisena. His victory was consolidated in the general election held in August 2015. There was a lot of euphoria when this…
Sirisena’s double standard: the heavy cost to Muslim IDPs
President Maithripala Sirisena says that the Muslim IDPs have encroached and destroyed land belonging to the Wilpattu National Park (June 2015). President Sirisena says Muslims have not cleared one inch of Wilpattu…
How not to release an official report on reconciliation
Image courtesy Consultation Task Force, featuring submission by to it. Details here. After months of waiting, the final report of the Consultation Task Force, set up by the Prime Minister in January…
Three scenarios for Sri Lanka’s future: Lecture by Razeen Sally
An expected economic take-off has not happened two years into the change of government says Prof. Razeen Sally, chairman of the Institute of Policy studies in Sri Lanka. Delivering a public lecture…
