The Sri Lankan Government has scored greater success in its war against terrorism, Japanese special peace envoy Yasushi Akashi said.  

“I believe an environment in which all could live in peace and harmony in the near future will dawn in Sri Lanka under the leadership of President Mahinda Rajapaksa,” Akashi said when he called on President Rajapaksa at Temple Trees yesterday

Sri Lanka Army announced that troops of 59 Division, lead by Brigadier Nandana Udawatta, entered into the LTTE's main garrison town Mullaittivu, have gained total control over the Mullaittivu Township after completing the mop up operations conducted in the area by yesterday evening, 25 January.   

Recapturing the Mullaittivu town which had been dominated by the LTTE terrorists for last 13 years marks the significant milestone of war against terrorism launched to free the entire country from LTTE.

It is a new dawn for the United States, and also, though not as brightly and unambiguously, for the world. It is a new dawn for the people of the USA, after a long struggle against slavery, segregation, racism and racial discrimination, and more recently the economic philosophy of free market fundamentalism. It is a new dawn for the United States as a country. It has set an example by electing an outstanding personality, by revealing and restoring its better self, by showing itself to be a progressive society and by choosing someone who is committed to correcting the country’s course. Already it is looked up to again, and by its new combination of reason and resolve, is on its way to reasserting its global role by acclaim as much as by assertiveness.

January 23, 2009:  As the LTTE is forced back into a corner (400 square kilometers) of northeast Sri Lanka (including about 40 kilometers of coastline). There, several thousand LTTE gunmen are accompanied by over 200,000 civilians (many involuntarily). In the last week or so, 300-400 of these civilians a week have fled to government controlled territory. The army has surrounded the coastal town of Mullaittivu, which is the center of LTTE operations. The army believes it can destroy this last LTTE enclave in about three months.