Rukshan Perera’s ODE in Appreciation of the Frontline Workers who battled and Still Battle COVID
Thanking the Frontline Heroes in a song – When the world is at a standstill with Coronavirus Covid-19, let us pray for our heroes who are working day and night to save lives and bring the world back on track. This is a dedication to our heroes – healthcare workers, armed forces and all others on the frontline sacrificing their lives to save us from this unimaginable pandemic, Covid-19 Coronavirus.
Raucous Aucous … with highlighting imposed by Thuppahi
A: A Report from New Zealand: (see news headline in Appendix). They are not interested in Aukus or Quad and wish to keep right out of it which is ironic as the Philippines, an Asian country, wants to dig their noses right in it.
Former NZ Prime Minister Helen Clark says, “New Zealand interests do not lie in being associated with Aukus” because it would damage their foreign policy, which is a very strong statement.
Unlike the Philippines, New Zealand is not aligned with the US military, nor does it wish to do so. That will irritate Australia as well.
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Raucous Aukus … in an original essay for Thuppahi, who has taken the liberty of inserting highlights selectively
Peter Jennings is without doubt the most odious and dangerous warmonger in Australia today. His frequent writings in The Australian demonstrate an absolute hate for dissenting or opposing voices. He claims to be a man of peace, yet his writings read like a Manifesto for War. He has reiterated that bipartisan support for Aukus is fundamental to keeping it going, and that politicians on all sides must stand united with Aukus and America and resolutely against China.
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Groundviews, 14 March 2023, where the title reads “Military to Face a Day of Reckoning Over the Disappeared”
In a landmark case last month, the Vavuniya High Court ordered the army to produce three LTTE members who had surrendered to the military in May 2019 and have been missing ever since, in response to a habeas corpus case filed by their wives.
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Sidharth Monga, in ESPNcricinfo.com, 22 March 2023, “Zampa and Co stifle India to take series 2-1″
Reuters Item, 22 March 2023
The Solomon Islands has awarded a multi-million-dollar contract to a Chinese state company to upgrade an international port in Honiara in a project funded by the Asian Development Bank, an official of the island nation said on Wednesday.
The United States and its allies, including Australia, New Zealand and Japan, have held concerns that China has ambitions to build a naval base in the region since the Solomon Islands struck a security pact with Beijing last year.
Anoma Pieris presents her work on “Pacific War Incarceration Camps” …. to the world
While there have been many excellent studies on colonial penal environments in the Asia Pacific region, mainly prisons, very few scholars have approached the wartime internment and prisoner of war camps associated with the Pacific War as comparable carceral spaces that might offer deeper insights into imperial and national forms of political sovereignty and border conflict. There are few comparative studies across geographical areas or imperial regimes. Sarah Kovner’s book Prisoners of Empire: Inside Japanese POW Camps (Harvard University Press 2020), though focused on Japanese military imperialism, is important for that focus, and increasingly, several anthologies have offered us a similar analytical breadth by juxtaposing numerous national perspectives. The Architecture of Confinement: Incarceration Camps of the Pacific War (Cambridge University Press, 2022) is similarly ambitious in its scope. It uses the arc of the Pacific Basin to frame a comparative study including Australia, Singapore, North America and Japan as important nodal points in the wartime incarceration camp geography. Its aim is to investigate the impact of the war on settler societies, more so than on the imperial contestants dominating both theatres of World War II.
Anoma Pieris and Lynne Horiuchi at former Cowra POW Camp site in 2016 … photo: Anoma Pieris.
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A Vale in[1] Appreciation, From Miss Norah Roberts Fort, Galle, 10th July 1976
Letter to: The Editor, “Sunday Observer”, Colombo
T.W.ROBERTS ……………………………. An Appreciation[2]
At the age of 17 my father, Thomas Webb Roberts won the Barbados Scholarship from Queens College, Barbados, and entered the Oxford University where he passed both the Classical Mods and Grates in the first class before he was 21. He topped the list in the open competition for the Colonial Civil Service. He also found time to get married when he was only 18, to my mother[3] who was also 18. When he came out to the C.C.S. at 21 he had 3 children, Isabella, T.F.C and G. C. Roberts.[4]
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An Observer in a Georgian Black Sea Resort Town
The NED/CIA have been using soft power to target the youth and media institutions in countries around the world. Take Georgia and Hong Kong as case studies.
Protestors rally against the draft law outside the Georgian parliament in Tbilisi.
In the last few weeks, the Georgian parliament, the elected representatives of the country, tried to introduce a Foreign Agent’s Register Act just like the one Australia introduced in 2018. The Georgian version used very similar language to the US foreign agent’s registration law which was passed in the 1930s. Suddenly, the Georgian youth came out on to street demanding the government reject this draft law. EU leaders labelled the proposed Georgian foreign register law as being “against EU values”, even though almost all EU countries have the same law. This is a repeat performance of what happened in Hong Kong in 2018-2019.
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Michael Roberts … Content of His Talk on this topic at the National Trust in Colombo in June 2018
The National Trust’s brief was for me to present motifs from the book People Inbetween. The Burghers and the Middle Class in the Transformations within Sri Lanka, 1790-1960s, (Ratmalana, Sarvodaya Book Publishing Services, 1989) and more specifically its first chapter viz. “Pejorative Phrases: the Anti-colonial Response and Sinhala Perceptions of the Self through Images of the Burghers”
Many think People Inbetween is a history of the Burghers. Not so. It is multi-faceted. It describes (a) the rise of the middle class in British times, an influential force within which the Burghers were a critical element and a vanguard in the questioning of British rule; (b) the initial strands in the development of Ceylonese nationalism and (c) the development of Colombo into a metropolitan hub that became the island’s hegemonic centre.
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thuppahi
