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History and Culture

Factum Perspective: Rethinking US-Sri Lanka ties

By Uditha Devapriya During a visit to Sri Lanka on December 14, 2015, then US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Designate Thomas Shannon announced the launch of the first US-Sri Lanka Partnership Dialogue. The Dialogue, held in February the following year at Washington , sought to enhance cooperation between the two…

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Factum Special Perspective: The troubled history of Sri Lanka – DPRK relations

By Chandani Kirinde The emphasis of the United Front (UF) government of Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranaike, which took office in May 1970, was to forge a new foreign policy that would move away from the pro-West policies of the UNP government, replacing them with a policy of non-alignment. While, theoretically, the focus was on non-alignment, in…

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Factum Perspective: Mission Accomplished? – The War in Iraq at 20

Vinod Moonesinghe At the beginning of 2003, the United States seemed on top of the world. The sole superpower, its ideologues spoke openly of America as the “global policeman”, fighting multiple major wars enforcing a “Pax Americana.”  That March, the US invaded Iraq, setting in motion a sequence of events which resulted in today’s increasingly…

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Factum Perspective: The rise of the regional film – A paradigm shift in South Asian cinema

By Deshani Samaragunarathna “Telugu is the new Hindi.” Ram Gopal Varma Unlike the American cinema, there is no single film hub in the Indian subcontinent. Bollywood has long held the distinction of being India's “national cinema.” With stars such as Priyanka Chopra making forays into Hollywood and artistes like A. R Rahman winning Academy Awards,…

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Factum Perspective: Indo-Sri Lankan relations since independence – A checkered history

Read this article in Tamil: vidiyal.lk/post/--2812 By P. K. Balachandran India-Sri Lanka relations are undoubtedly at their best now, thanks to India’s timely and generous assistance to its financially-beleaguered southern neighbor. But in the past 75 years or more, bilateral relations have been overwhelmingly troubled. Therefore, the million-dollar question now is: Will India’s help…

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Factum Perspective: Peace on Earth, the message of Christmas?

By Vinod Moonesinghe With the expansion of proselytizing Christian empires in the centuries before the second millennium, Christianity became a world religion. As Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta said, "When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened…

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