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Foreign reserves are not the sole metric for measuring a nation's economic strength, as reserves serve as a self-insurance mechanism that fluctuates according to periodic requirements, Minister of Labour and Deputy Minister of Finance and Planning Dr. Anil Jayantha said.

Speaking in Parliament during the parliamentary debate on resolutions under the Finance Act, he addressed criticism regarding the adequacy of Sri Lanka's current reserve position by noting that even the International Monetary Fund (IMF) scaled back its initial reserve accumulation targets for Sri Lanka in 2023.

Reserves maintained despite major dollar outflows

The Minister said that the government deliberately released foreign exchange buffers to support essential economic activity, citing the recent decision to permit vehicle imports as a key example.

He revealed that while no provisions were allocated for vehicle imports in 2023, the government's decision to reopen the market resulted in letters of credit worth USD 3.5 billion being opened to date.

Had those funds remained unspent in state coffers, the total official reserves would have expanded by an equivalent USD 3.5 billion.

He also emphasised that despite settling a debt obligation of USD 2.6 billion alongside these major import expenses, the government successfully maintained gross official foreign reserves at USD 6.6 billion.

Relatives of victims have gathered in Sri Lanka's Eastern Province to mark the 41st anniversary of a massacre of unarmed Tamil civilians allegedly carried out by the military.

Local journalists reported that family members paid tribute on Sunday using flowers, lamps, and incense near the main road in Varothayanagar, Trincomalee.

The site is close to where the victims' homes once stood before the killings occurred more than four decades ago.

The memorial service paid tribute to all residents killed in the vicinity during that period, including 10 people slain on 17 August 1985.

Drive by shooting spree

According to surviving relatives, a group of Sri Lankan soldiers arrived in a Defender vehicle from the Kanniya area on August 17, 1985.

They opened fire continuously along the road as they moved through the village.

Local residents Wellayan Thiruchelvam and his father-in-law Kandan Manikkam were shot dead in the initial attack.

The same military unit then drove towards Kandaiya Road, where another resident, Seeniyan Manikkam, was killed in a second round of shooting.

Terrified by the sudden gun violence, local villagers fled their homes to seek shelter in neighboring properties.

Deadly bomb attack

A bomb targeted one of the houses where fleeing residents had gathered for safety later that same day.

The blast killed five members of a single family, Gunarasa Vaseekala, Gunarasa Sangar, Gunarasa Genga, Thesingan Imban, and Thesingan Jayanthi.

Two other residents, Rasarathnam Rabendra Rasa and Kadirgamapillai Nageswari, were also killed in the explosion.

Surviving villagers managed to transport the dead and wounded to Trincomalee Hospital by evening.

Relatives said that an eight-year-old girl admitted for medical treatment vanished from the hospital wards, with her whereabouts remaining unknown to this day.

(lankaleader.lk)

A new war looms for Sri Lanka if the nation fails to build its foreign reserves to USD 15 billion before debt repayments resume after 2028, former president Ranil Wickremesinghe warned.

Speaking at the launch of former minister Ranjith Siyambalapitiya's book, 'Yudha Dekakata Ura Dee', at the Bandaranaike Memorial International Conference Hall in Colombo, the former president urged the country to focus on its long term financial survival.

He stressed that generating sufficient foreign exchange to meet debt obligations once restructuring and international aid wrap up must become the central point of economic debate.

The former president noted that Central Bank of Sri Lanka projections expect gross official reserves to reach USD 8 billion by the end of this year. However, he stated that reserves must rise further to around USD 15 billion by 2028.

Depending on whether the calculation starts from the current position or the year end target, he identified the gap as an additional requirement of either USD 6 billion or USD 7 billion.

The former president observed that the main problem facing the nation was how to repay the debt, adding that this matter required far greater focus than political or constitutional questions.

He reminded the audience that emergency support from India, Bangladesh, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and Japan had helped stabilise the country during the height of the crisis.

He cautioned that circumstances after the current phase of international support would be far more difficult.

With the International Monetary Fund programme concluding in March 2027, he questioned what economic framework the government would pursue afterwards.

He also highlighted an additional obligation involving approximately USD 3 billion in bonds.

The former president expressed concern over attempts to step outside key legal frameworks, such as the Economic Transformation Act, warning that such moves could risk bringing the country back to bankruptcy.

He lamented that neither Parliament nor the public had engaged in sufficient discussion regarding these looming commitments.

Drawing a direct link to the book title, which references two past wars, the former president argued that Sri Lanka was now approaching a third war focused entirely on economic endurance.

He noted that although the past two wars were over, another war was fast approaching.

The former president said that he had not brought good news, noting his habit of delivering tough warnings.

For details on sovereign debt schedules and official macroeconomic indicators, citizens can check updates provided directly by the Central Bank of Sri Lanka. Voters seeking information on broader governance structures and civic processes can refer to the Election Commission of Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka’s dengue situation continues to place pressure on public health authorities, with the number of reported cases reaching 92,854 and dengue-related deaths rising to 69 in 2026.

Data released by the National Dengue Control Unit (NDCU) shows that the disease has maintained a significant presence throughout the year, with the latest figures putting the case fatality rate at 0.07%.

The spread has varied considerably from month to month. July emerged as the worst-affected month so far, recording 29,964 cases. June followed with 21,533 cases, while 7,516 cases were reported during August.

Earlier in the year, the country recorded 7,866 cases in January, followed by 5,721 in February, 6,013 in March, 5,651 in April and 8,590 in May.

The distribution of cases also remains concentrated in several districts.

Gampaha has recorded the highest number, with 19,778 cases, representing 21.30% of the national total. Colombo accounts for 18,433 cases, or 19.85%, while Kandy has reported 6,695 cases, equivalent to 7.21%.

Against this backdrop, the NDCU has identified 96 high-risk Medical Officer of Health (MOH) areas nationwide.

Authorities continue to focus on controlling the spread of the mosquito-borne disease, with the latest figures underscoring the continued need for dengue prevention and control measures across affected communities.

India won the first test in Galle by 165 runs on the fifth day just minutes before a heavy downpour might have saved Sri Lanka on Wednesday.

Left-arm spinner Manav Suthar took three wickets in the 76th over of Sri Lanka's second innings and cleaned up the last wicket in the 78th to dismiss the home side for 206.

Suthar picked 6-55 and completed his maiden 10-wicket haul in his second test.

India scored 462 and 193 with Devdutt Padikkal leading with 167 and 44. Sri Lanka responded with 284 runs and began a vain chase of a winning target of 372.

It lost four wickets on Tuesday afternoon and its main resistance between Sonal Dinusha and Dhananjaya de Silva was broken on the last morning. From 175-6 at lunch, Sri Lanka lost the last four wickets for 31 runs across 64 deliveries.

The second test starts on Sunday in Colombo.

Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa met with Tamil and Muslim parliamentarians representing opposition parties at his parliamentary office today.

Discussions focused extensively on pressing challenges faced by communities across the Northern and Eastern provinces.

Lawmakers briefed the Opposition Leader on daily social, economic, and developmental difficulties affecting local residents, while also highlighting urgent regional grievances.

The meeting prioritized plans to raise these provincial concerns more forcefully on the floor of Parliament and secure direct legislative interventions.

The delegation included MPs M. L. A. M. Hizbullah, M.S.A. Vaseeth, M.T.M. Thaheer, Thurairasa Ravikaran, Imran Maharoof, M.S. U. Lebbe, Rauff Hakeem, Dr. Ramanathan Archchuna, Nizam Kariyapper, Kader Masthan, A. Adaikalanathan, Shanakiyan Rasamanickam, and Mano Ganesan.

Multiple defendants on trial for the 2019 Easter Sunday suicide bombings told the Colombo High Court that police investigators subjected them to torture and planted false evidence to extract signatures on prepared confessions.

The allegations were raised on Tuesday (18) before a three-judge bench consisting of High Court Judges Navaratne Marasinghe, Ramanathan Kannan, and Sujeeva Nishshanka.

The trial panel is currently receiving oral statements from 24 individuals who face more than 23,000 combined charges in connection with the synchronized attacks that devastated the country seven years ago.

Focusing on the forensic claims against him, seventh defendant Mohamed Mansoor Mohamed Sanasdeen, a sweetmeats vendor, stated that his arrest relied entirely on a fingerprint retrieved from adhesive tape at a Panadura safehouse.

He informed the court that patrons frequently used tape at his business to pack goods and maintained that he had never set foot inside the Panadura site.

Broadening the complaints against the investigating officers, defendants including Abdul Manaf Mohamed Firdous and Rashid Mohamed Ibrahim backed claims of physical mistreatment while in custody.

They alleged that Criminal Investigation Department officers warned them that their female relatives would be detained if they refused to sign pre printed confession documents.

Addressing the bench for almost two hours, second defendant Mohammadu Adam Lebbe repudiated all counts connecting him to ringleader Zahran Hashim.

He described being suspended in handcuffs and beaten by investigators, asserting that he never attended radicalisation lectures in Nuwara Eliya or aided suicide bombers.

Highlighting the tragedy that struck his own household, he noted that his daughter and grandchildren lost their lives in the explosion at the Sainthamaruthu safehouse.

He requested a full acquittal, adding that he would have chosen to perish alongside his family members had he been involved in any suicide bombing plot.

The widespread allegations of severe custodial abuse and compromised forensic integrity cast a troubling shadow over the accountability mechanisms surrounding one of the most devastating security failures in modern Sri Lankan history.

Asia’s stability will not be secured by treating one power’s Security Council seat as a precondition of legitimacy, nor by dressing two modern sovereign states in the borrowed costume of “civilisational states.” Not by asking two proud peoples to give up on trust itself.

It will be secured the old-fashioned way — through international law, patient diplomacy, and the accumulation—not the abandonment—of confidence. The century ahead needs the UN Charter applied consistently and neighbours who treat trust as a destination worth walking toward, not a mirage to dismiss before the journey begins. Let me explain where I differ with an otherwise thoughtful essay.

Milinda Moragoda’s recent column in The Print (https://sl1nk.com/voi1qob) deserves genuine praise, and I want to start there. He is right that the boundary dispute is a serious, unresolved matter, not a rhetorical inconvenience. He is right that recent years have deposited a heavy sediment of suspicion on both sides of the Himalaya. He is right that great powers can hold competition and cooperation in the same hand, and that the trick of statesmanship is preventing the former from swallowing the latter. He is right that small, practical projects — in public health, disaster response, climate adaptation, and scholarly exchange — build the connective tissue that grand summits cannot. He is also right to champion multiple tracks of dialogue, from Track 1.5 forums to parliamentary and academic exchange. And he is right that India and China need not, and should not, become the nucleus of a bloc arrayed against Washington or anyone else. A world organised into hostile camps is poorer and more dangerous for everyone, including the two countries at its centre. Above all, he is right that the two countries do not need to resolve every difference before they can cooperate on anything.

But four moves in Moragoda’s argument deserve revisiting. First, he treats India’s ambition for a permanent Security Council seat as something close to a litmus test of whether multilateralism is working. China’s actual position, repeated by its ambassadors at the UN, is that reform must prioritise the representation of developing countries, above all Africa, based on broad consensus rather than the self-nomination of any single aspirant, a principle China restated as recently as November 2025. This is not obstruction for its own sake; it reflects a judgement, shared across much of the emerging economies, that enlarging the Council only for a handful of already-powerful aspirants would entrench inequity rather than cure it. Beijing does not make India’s Council ambitions a hinge of bilateral cooperation, and an essay that quietly does so imports a premise China does not share.

Second, the essay leans on the vocabulary of the “civilizational state,” popularised by writers like Martin Jacques and later theorists of civilisational geopolitics. It is seductive, but it is not how Chinese diplomacy frames the relationship. China’s own foreign ministry describes India as a “partner rather than rival” and grounds the relationship in the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence — a doctrine born, fittingly, from Zhou Enlai and Nehru’s 1954 talks, and built explicitly on sovereignty, non-interference, and legal equality, not on romantic narratives of two rival civilizations circling one another. Substituting civilisational grandeur for legal sovereignty risks softening the very treaty-based, boundary-based realism that any durable settlement requires.

Third, and most striking, the essay asks the two countries to “resist” and even abandon the “expectation of trust” as the organising goal. Chinese diplomacy has said the opposite, repeatedly and recently. Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s own language after the 2024 Kazan meeting between Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi calls for consistently increasing political mutual trust. In August 2025, Wang in New Delhi insisted that “mutual trust and mutual support should define the relationship between two major emerging countries.” A relationship that merely manages permanent low trust through transactional projects is a lesser ambition than the one Beijing has actually set for itself.

Fourth, the essay’s history is too tidy. Ancient Chinese-Indian exchange was real and precious, but it was not friction-free, and China’s own scholarship on the sinicisation of Buddhism tells a more interesting story than pure harmony. Indian Buddhism took root in China only by fusing with Huang-Lao Daoist thought, being translated into Taoist vocabulary, and becoming, over centuries, something distinctly Chinese rather than an imported orthodoxy. That is a story of creative adaptation and, at times, contest — not a seamless idyll.

None of this diminishes Moragoda’s larger and correct instinct that pragmatic, incremental cooperation should proceed even amid disagreement — a position echoed, from the Indian strategic-affairs side, by Ambassador Sujan Chinoy’s argument that cooperation can advance even under continued rivalry. But there is a difference worth naming. Ambassador Chinoy treats rivalry and cooperation as parallel tracks that need never meet; Beijing’s stated goal is to convert cooperation into trust, not to manage rivalry indefinitely as a stable equilibrium. They are stages in one unfinished process, not sealed compartments.

That is the deeper lesson of 75 years of China-India diplomacy since the Panchsheel Agreement. The goal is not to normalize distrust as the price of doing business, but to reduce it, treaty by treaty and project by project, until sovereignty and law — not suspicion, and not borrowed civilisational metaphors — are what the two great Asian nations have most durably in common. That is a harder, slower path than either romantic convergence or resigned rivalry. It is also the only one that has ever actually worked.

By Huang Yunsong,

(HUANG Yunsong, Professor & Associate Dean, Sichuan University China Center for South Asian Studies, School of International Studies. Views are personal. Courtesy The Print) ‎<This message was edited>

The Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) today moved the Supreme Court to challenge the proposed 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, arguing that the legislation threatens democratic principles and fundamental rights.

The petition, filed under case number SC/SD/31/2026, was lodged shortly after the Bill was formally presented to Parliament.

In its application, the SJB is seeking a determination on the constitutionality of the proposed amendment and its broader legal implications.

The main opposition party raised serious concerns over the Bill's provisions, noting that the amendment could undermine Sri Lanka's democratic framework, erode the separation of powers, and compromise fundamental rights guaranteed under the Constitution.

The Matara Magistrate’s Court has ordered the forfeiture of bail money deposited on behalf of former Minister Basil Rajapaksa after he failed to appear in court in connection with a case involving the alleged purchase of property with illicit funds.

The order was issued yesterday (18) by Matara Chief Magistrate Chathura Dissanayake.

Rajapaksa is the third accused in the case, which was initially filed by the Police Financial Crimes Investigation Division (FCID). The case concerns an alleged purchase of a 1.5-acre property located along Brownhill, Eliyakanda Road in Matara.

During the proceedings, the court was informed that Rajapaksa had repeatedly failed to attend hearings and had not produced a medical report considered acceptable by the court to explain his absence.

The magistrate subsequently ordered fines to be imposed on the three individuals who had provided surety for Rajapaksa’s bail. The court further directed that the sureties could face imprisonment if the fines were not paid.

An arrest warrant previously issued against Rajapaksa has also been extended.

The matter is scheduled to return before the Matara Magistrate’s Court on October 27.

The first and second accused appeared before court on Tuesday, while Rajapaksa was again absent. FCID officers appeared for the prosecution, with a defence team headed by President’s Counsel Anil de Silva representing the accused.