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Home » ColumnsPresident refuses extension for PM’s ranking bodyguard
President Maithripala Sirisena has said there will be no extensions of service to police officers who retire. The issue came into focus after Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe had recommended an extension of service to a ranking member of his personal security detail. President Sirisena, under whom the Police Department now functions, has said he had [...]
30 years in politics, picking winners and losers
My dear Khema’s boy, I thought I must write to you because you seem to be on all the front pages these days, what with celebrating 30 years in Parliament and presenting budgets in quick succession. In recent times, we haven’t seen and heard of one man so much in so little time, without doing [...]
Applauding the draft CTA is akin to a merry drunk dancing at the edge of a cliff
Sri Lanka’s draft Counter Terrorism Act (CTA) is not a curate’s egg of mostly good with a little bit of bad thrown in. Rather, it is the reverse. The draft Act is a whole lot of bad with some good thrown into the unappealing mixture. Ingenious traps by ‘deep state’ security agents Certainly it is [...]
The people’s friendly budget could undermine economic stability and growth
Lee Kwan Yu characterised Sri Lanka’s elections as an auction of non-existent resources. Sri Lanka’s budgets are the promises to give those non-existent resources. Sir Ivor Jennings observed that “truckling to the multitude” is a feature of electoral politics. This is clearly seen in Sri Lanka’s budgets that tend to placate the electorate by extravagant [...]
‘Abolish Presidency’ blues hit the charts again in poll’s year
Even as in spring time a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of love and romance, so do Lanka’s leading politicians begin to hum the old, known, well-worn tune of scrapping the presidency at every spring of a presidential poll year before raising it to a crescendo at the approach of winter’s end. And this [...]
The good, the replaceable and the worthless
How they must dislike the “Diyawanna Five”. Actually some of the 225, who parade themselves as the chosen people and the inhabitants of what they call an August Assembly, must surely hate the guts of the five colleagues who decided to open their assets and liabilities declarations for all to see. They could hardly have [...]
With no hope of SLPP backing, Sirisena may go it alone
Three major parties intensify campaigns for presidential election; SLFP puts up posters highlighting President’s achievements; UNF and SLPP also preparing at village level President and PM battle openly here and abroad; latest dispute over Geneva meeting of UNHRC and Govt. policy In Sri Lanka’s 71 years of independence from British rule, at no time [...]
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