UPDATED: Road to OMP Timeline
The 34th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) commenced on February 27 in Geneva. It was widely reported that Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera would most likely push for a…
International
Restoring Faith in Globalization
MUNICH – I must confess that I am a firm believer in the benefits of globalization. To my mind, the gradual interlinking of regions, countries, and people is the most profoundly positive…
Forecast for 2017: Dr Harinda Vidanage
This is the seventh in a series of video interviews forecasting what 2017 will have in store across different sectors. Director of the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies, Dr Harinda Vidanage speaks…
Trump’s First Victims
Image courtesy PRINCETON – When Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, I did not join those who took to the streets in protest. I thought it important to respect…
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…
Aleppo: A complete meltdown in humanity
.” – Zygmunt Bauma The world is witnessing in Syria a humanitarian catastrophe of historic proportions. People trapped in Aleppo have been posting goodbyes on social media. Russian forces supported by Iranians,…
US And Them
The United States and Sri Lanka both call themselves democratic societies. Like most of the rest of the world, we have had the U.S.A. held up to us as a model of…
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar
Like Gandhi, Ambedkar was truly a Mahatma and a great visionary. As the Chair of the Drafting Committee of the Indian Constitution, Ambedkar was primarily responsible for gifting to India a great…
Fidel and the Rock of Resistance
Photo courtesy Miami Herald According to an ancient Chinese musical treatise (written in the second century BCE), when any of the five notes in the Chinese pentatonic scale turns disharmonious, disorder results…
Yester-Years: The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna and The Cuban Revolution
In the 1950s, Cuban revolutionaries launched their July 26 Movement () to get rid of foreign domination and economic injustice. In 1952, Fulgencio Batista launched a coup d’etat, which made the Cuban…
A farewell to Fidel
Fidel was the last of the Titans, of the epic heroes. Whatever our travails, our generation and the ones before us were fortunate to live in the decades in which there were…
What Trump’s Win Teaches Sri Lanka
Photograph from NBC News Donald Trump’s surprising electoral victory last week gives us Americans a lot to think about. One takeaway is particularly relevant for Sri Lanka. Over the last eight years,…
Who’s Afraid of Donald Trump? | America Elects a Fact-Free President
### America Elects a Fact-Free President In the presidential election this week, US voters just elected an unorthodox, unlikely and unpredictable head of state. There are many ways of analysing this result….
Regaining Paradise with Donald Trump
Donald Trump’s victory is a beacon of hope to extremists of every stripe, from the Ku Klux Klan to Marine Le Pen, from Islamic extremists and Hindu nationalists to our very own…
Leonard Cohen: The Stranger, the Master
The master of the modern love song, whose intricate and intense musical cartography of the relationships between men and women provided the soundtrack of our private lives, has come down like Moses…
