Search Results for: Sri Lankan

BY DEIRDRE MASON, in London

WHEN DISASTER strikes, public generosity and government donations direct huge sums of money to help survivors and repair local economies. However, what happens next is out of the donors’ hands. They have to trust that the various aid agencies and organisations overseas are directing funds to bona fide projects and individuals.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

INDIA has been branded a serious hotspot for counterfeit books, in a global European Commission survey of countries where product fakes are manufactured. The Commission’s directorate general (DG) for trade gathered information from companies, diplomatic missions and trade federations.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE WORLD Trade Organisation has moved to prevent a ban on Sri Lanka cinnamon exports to the European Union over food health concerns. In talks, Sri Lankan producers were persuaded to swiftly adopt international safety standards.

ENDS…

BY KEITH NOYAHR, in Colombo

THE RESUMPTION of war in Sri Lanka is bad news. Period. But, ironically, there have been some benefits. One of these is a concentrating of the mind amongst law enforcement officials within Sri Lanka and their counterparts abroad into tracking down and stopping both terrorist financing and money laundering.…

BY KEITH NOYAHR, in Colombo

AIRLINE operators this week reviewed security at Sri Lanka’s Katunayake International Airport (KIA) days ahead of resuming night flights – suspended for two months since air attacks by the Tamil Tigers.

Its air defence has been made fully operational while Indian experts upgraded the radar system recently after the separatist Tigers in March dropped bombs from Czech-built ZLIN Z 143 aircraft on the Sri Lanka Air Force (SLAF) base, adjoining the airport.…

BY KEITH NOYAHR, in Colombo

JAFFNA University in northern Sri Lanka has been hamstrung with a gradual breakdown in the ceasefire between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) over the past six months.

"After December there has been an increase in violence.…

BY STEVEN SWINDELLS, in Johannesburg, South Africa and DAVID HAWORTH, in Taiwan

TRADITIONAL health care systems do not always get a good press, being accused of incorporating superstition and poor medical practice. To some western public health advocates, they are akin to bringing back the leach.…

BY STEVEN SWINDELLS, in Johannesburg

ONGOING recruitment of South African nurses to the UK is pushing South Africa’s already hard pressed public health system close to the brink of collapse and putting patient care at risk, the country’s lead nursing union and health experts have warned.…

BY KEITH NOYAHR, in Colombo

A YEAR after the Boxing Day tsunami, the four badly affected universities in Sri Lanka’s north, south and east are boxing on, with a bare minimum of repairs and reconstruction for want of funds. The University Grants Commission (UGC) had estimated the damage to the buildings and hostels at Ruhunu, South Eastern, Jaffna and Eastern universities to be SL Rupees 72 million (Pounds 387,000 at local prices), but its Chairman Professor Ranjith Mendis regretted that "the government and foreign donors had not been able" to find these sums.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
TEA companies paid hundreds of thousand of dollars in kickbacks to the toppled Saddam Hussein regime, the Independent Inquiry Committee into the UN Iraq Oil for Food programme scandal has claimed. More than 200 tea suppliers from countries including India, Indonesia, Russia and Sri Lanka bribed the Iraq government to secure contracts to supply humanitarian supplies under the scheme, out of 2,200 companies named in a committee report.…