Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa's government survived a crucial budget vote on Friday, fighting off a strong opposition challenge that could have frozen an escalating military offensive against separatist rebels.
The outcome remained in doubt until the vote on Friday evening as lawmakers in the coalition and outside the government changed sides in a swirl of political gamesmanship. One powerful minister resigned his post just minutes before the vote.
Had the government lost, it would have been forced to call new elections, likely paralyzing political activity in the country for months.
Over the past few weeks, Rajapaksa's ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party worked to shore up its razor-thin coalition by offering opposition lawmakers lucrative ministerial positions.
In the end, a slim majority of 114 lawmakers out of 225 approved the budget, parliamentary officials said. Another 67 voted against it, while the 38 lawmakers from the hard-line People's Liberation Front, a former coalition partner, abstained.
Rajapaksa's two-year-old government has vowed to crush the Tamil Tiger rebels. In July it declared it had pushed the separatists from the east, and since then has battled them in their heartland in the jungles of the north.
The budget includes the country's largest-ever defense expenditure -- 166.4 billion rupees (US$1.5 billion) -- for the war.
The total budget was estimated at about 1 trillion rupees.
Government officials accused the opposition of giving comfort to the rebels by trying to topple the coalition.
"The government is trying its best to eradicate terrorism from the country and allow people ... to live in a democratic and a free society," Media Minister Anura Yapa said. "What the opposition is trying to do is to nullify that."
Gayantha Karunatilake, a spokesman for the opposition United National Party, said the accusation was unfair, adding the party was only trying to do what was best for Sri Lankans.
The Tamil Tigers have fought since 1983 for an independent homeland for ethnic minority Tamils after decades of discrimination under governments controlled by the Sinhalese majority.
Fighting continued as troops killed a Tamil Tiger fighter near the front lines in Muhamalai in the northern Jaffna peninsula on Thursday evening, the military said on Friday.
Meanwhile, a London-based rights group accused the government of illegally detaining large numbers of Tamils and Muslims and ignoring civilian rights in its efforts to crush the rebels.
Minority Rights Group International said year-old anti-terror laws have created a deteriorating security situation that led to the killing, abduction and disappearance of hundreds of people.
Between January and August, 662 people were killed and 540 others disappeared, the group said in a report released on Friday.
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS