COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Japan’s ambassador to Sri Lanka on Thursday highlighted plans to supply unmanned aerial vehicles to the Sri Lanka Navy and a new exchange programme for military personnel. Both are part of a security relationship that Tokyo has widened over the past year. The ambassador, Akio Isomata, described the initiatives at a reception the Japanese Embassy in Colombo held for the 72nd anniversary of the founding of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces. Guests included Sri Lanka’s deputy defenc

On Oct. 5, Niroshan Arumainayagam was on the telephone from Switzerland with the woman he was going to marry. Anne Laksha Ignatius was telling him about the trouble a former student had been causing her. Then, he says, she heard shouting, told him she would go and see what was happening, and the call was cut off. She did not call back. Ms. Ignatius, a culinary and hospitality instructor born in 1994, was stabbed to death that evening at her family’s home on Temple Road in Nallur, Jaffna. Her mo

JAFFNA, November 8, 2026 The funeral procession of Thambithurai Ilayakutty stopped on Sunday at Palaly Junction, where displaced landowners were protesting for the 21st consecutive week to demand that the military return their land. Ilayakutty, 83, had protested there with them. The protesters paid their respects to her body at the site. She died of old age on Saturday, November 7. For years she had told those close to her that she wanted to die in her own house in Palaly and have her funeral

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka- Kamzy Gunaratnam, Norway’s Minister of Transport, marked Father’s Day on Sunday with a tribute to her father, a refugee from Sri Lanka’s civil war who worked for years in Norway’s fishing industry and in kitchens before going to evening school to earn a cook’s trade certificate at 59. In a Facebook post written in Norwegian, Ms. Gunaratnam, 38, who was born in Jaffna and arrived in Norway at the age of three, called her father her greatest role model. She wrote about the cour