President Mahinda Rajapaksa yesterday ordered LTTE leader and his remaining cadres to lay down arms, surrender and free thousands of civilians to avoid total annihilation.

Speaking to party supporters at Temple Trees yesterday evening, President Rajapaksa said the LTTE, unable to face the military thrust, was now hiding in the no-fire-zone, holding thousands of innocent civilians as a human shield, a press release issued by the President Media Unit noted. 

The United Nations advocate for displaced persons today called for urgent measures to save civilians trapped in a tiny pocket of northern Sri Lanka by fighting between the Government and the LTTE.

by Rajiva Wijesinha 

Secretary General, Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process

 Amnesty International, with pertinacity worthy of the LTTE, has once more returned to the charge against the Sri Lankan government. As usual it begins its diatribe with affirming its principled balance between an elected government and terrorists, between legitimate armed forces who do not attack civilians and terrorists who do this as a matter of principle, between those who are seeking to free the trapped people Amnesty purports to care about and those who are entrapping them.

The long displaced persons in the Puttalam settlements are gradually becoming very much a part of the socio-economic structure of the area, and the government is undertaking initiatives to empower them and provide opportunities for income generation. 

Over 112,000 people were displaced from Mannar, Mullativu and Jaffna, due to the ethnic cleansing practised by the LTTE against Muslims in 1990.

Sri Lanka won the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) Award, the International Press Prize, 3 Gold medals, 1 Silver medal and 2 Bronze medals for the 7 inventions the country presented at the 37th International Exhibition of Inventions, Techniques and Products of Geneva which was held at Geneva Palexpo (Hall 7) in Switzerland from 1^st to 5^th April 2009.  

by Franklin R. Satyapalan 

One of the members of "Tamil Diaspora for Dialogue", Mrs Rajeswari Balasubramaniam, yesterday appealed to LTTE leader Prabhakaran for the release of innocent civilians trapped in the "No Fire Zone".

By Amantha Perera / Colombo

For more than 30 years, Velupillai Prabhakaran has been Sri Lanka's most wanted. And the authorities now believe that they have cornered the elusive commander of one of the world's deadliest and most resilient insurgencies. Sri Lankan military officials said Sunday that more than 500 cadres of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam had been killed in fighting over the weekend, and that the Tamil separatist fighters are now confined to a narrow costal stretch a little over seven miles long in northern Sri Lanka — a far cry from the vast swathes of eastern and northern Sri Lanka controlled by the insurgents just two years ago. And eight military divisions with as many as 50,000 personnel backed by air support are going in for the kill, with escape and supply routes by sea blocked off by a naval blockade. (Watch TIME's video of civilians caught in Sri Lankan civil war.)

by D.B.S. Jeyaraj 

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) organization suffered a terrible blow in the Aanandapuram area of Puthukkudiyiruppu AGA division. 

In what may very well be the defining moment of the on going war, the tigers have lost a vast array of illustrious fighting commanders as well as large numbers of cadres in a single battle.

by Ru Freeman

"Democracy is a messy thing and all of these voices must be heard," said Amy Goodman, speaking as a journalist and for Democracy NOW, on the Bill Moyers show on Friday. She and Glenn Greenwald from Salon.com were being interviewed as the first recipients of the Park Center for Independent Media Izzy Award, named for I. F. Stone, the iconoclastic investigative journalist who self-published his alternative news in the I.F. Stone's Weekly in the 1960s. Goodman herself was participating in the seventy city "Standing Up To The Madness" tour for Democracy NOW where they were attempting to give unheard voices their due place on the airwaves. Journalists, according to Goodman and Greenwald, both of whom I admire and quote widely, are supposed to give the people the truth, not the party line. Which got me thinking, as a journalist, about truth, how we report it, the trustworthiness of our sources, and the way in which we choose to cover one part of the world versus another.

It is those who fire on escaping civilians who should be told to cease / pause / stop such firing 

Language, Truth and Logic was the title of a seminal work by the philosopher A. J. Ayer, who in effect popularized empiricism in the English speaking world. Empiricism, to put it simply, is the school of thought which requires concrete evidence for the positions people take up. Sadly, terrorism now seems to have effectively destroyed reliance on evidence, insofar as the pronouncements of people on the Sri Lankan situation go. Language and truth and logic seem to have been the principal victims, apart from human beings, of the strange fascination terror has for people who should know better.

Sri Lankan bred rapper defends his use of the N-word and puts world issues on world stage

By Kenya M. Yarbrough

Sri Lankan/Cali rapper DeLon is prepping a new disc and reppin’ a new era in hip hop. The international artist, whose real name is Dilan Jayasingha, has already scored three #1 hits and nabbed the Best Rapper honor at the Sri Lankan MTV Awards equivalent.

Sri Lanka violence repels two while a third clings to hope 

It started 30 years ago with a Somerville post office box registered to a grandiose name: the Embassy of Eelam.

Three brothers from Sri Lanka who lived on Mount Vernon Street turned their dining room into an international headquarters for the struggle to create a homeland for the ethnic Tamil minority. It would be called Eelam.

By C. Bryson Hull 

COLOMBO (Reuters) - Sri Lanka's military said on Sunday troops had confined the Tamil Tiger rebels to a no-fire zone, where the last act of the 25-year separatist war will play out with tens of thousands of civilians still trapped. 

Three separate units killed at least 420 rebels after surrounding them in a triangle-shaped single square kilometre (0.5 square mile) during a three-day battle, the military said.

New Delhi (IANS) India has broken yet another Tamil Tiger ring that sought to smuggle war material to the rebels, arresting four men including a British national of Sri Lankan origin in Chennai. 

Acting painstaking sleuthing, the four were formally detained Friday from the southern Chennai suburb of Thiruvanmaiyur. They included a member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

President Mahinda Rajapaksa has ended a simmering controversy over the move to recall Sri Lankan Ambassador in Geneva Dayan Jayatilleke on the completion of his two-year term by extending it by another year.

By Quintus Perera

 Colombo (Asiantribune.com): To concede the World Accreditation Day June 9, the third Regional SAARC Accreditation Follow-up Workshop in association with PTB Cooperation Germany, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, SAARC Secretariat, SAARC Chamber of Commerce and Industry, will be held in Colombo from 8 to 10 June, according to Tissa Jayaweera, Senior Vice President, Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry of Sri Lanka (FCCISL).

Given my deep affection for all things British, I had been wondering for some time whether we had not been unfair to Des Browne, in refusing to accept him as the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy to Sri Lanka. The poor man might have been hurt and I had been told by someone who had worked for him that he was comparatively one of the nicer people to have been Secretary of State for Defence, not an easy task in the midst of the British offensive against non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

Toronto (Asiantribune.com): The Executive board members of Canadian Tamils for Peace and Democracy today voted unanimously in favour of an emergency resolution put forward declaring absolute support to the President of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa to eradicate Terrorism in Sri Lanka.

By Scott McDonald

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka: He has been the No. 1 target of Sri Lanka's military for 25 years. Now, Velupillai Prabhakaran's fate capture, death, flight is key to how the endgame in the island's civil war unfolds.