Sri Lankan Airlines in Giant Leap to OZ

Elephantine Step towards Skippy the Kangaroo

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Floods: Ruwani’s Swimming Efforts in Aid

A Tale from”Prasa,” her proud father

Dear Friends, …… I like to share something with you which made me very proud of my older daughter Ruwani, who is now in Sri Lanka. During last years floods she together with a group of friends formed an impromptu relief and rescue group.  To my knowledge it included two doctors,  a couple of divers, an ex Army Major and a handful of others including Ruwani.  They went when there was an appeal for swimmers to rescue marooned people. Last time she had swam out and done a number of swims carrying food parcels in siri siri bags in her mouth for the stranded victims who could not be brought a shore. They set up camp and treated many with first aid. They also collected dry rations clothes etc. individually through friends and made sure they went 100%  deserving.

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Flood Relief Donations: Pathways for Australians

The Situation Report  issued by the Disaster Management Center today at 7 am Sri Lanka time on the 29th May said that around 471,542 people belonging to 128,586 families were affected in 15 Districts . 164 deaths and 104 missing reported . Further, 75,236 people belonging to 18,652 families were located at 336 safe locations.


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“Demons in Paradise” at Cannes: Jude Rutnam in Firing Line

Hindustan Times,  http://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/film-breaks-silence-on-madness-of-sri-lanka-civil-war/story-s9DP6d5Owq4SrySIlbDOpL.htmlhttp://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/film-breaks-silence-on-madness-of-sri-lanka-civil-war/story-s9DP6d5Owq4SrySIlbDOpL.html

 Jude Ratnam is worried how his film might go down with his fellow Sri Lankan Tamils. And he has a point. Demons in Paradise, which is premiering at the Cannes film festival, tells of the bloodbath that drove some Tamils to take up arms in the three decade-long insurgency that tore the island apart. But the documentary also shatters a taboo by insisting that some of most horrific violence the minority endured was at the hands of their supposed defenders, the Tamil Tigers.  And the “hard truth” comes from the mouths of former Tamil fighters   themselves.

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Severe Floods and Landslides in South-Western Lanka

 

News Reports

The number of deaths reported in floods and landslides was increased to 126 while 97 people had gone missing, the Disaster Management Centre (DMC) said today. In its latest situation report, the DMC said the adverse weather condition had left 49 people injured. In total, 423,068 people of 109,773 families had been affected by the weather calamity. The South-West monsoon unleashed torrential rains, which ravaged fourteen districts in the western and southern parts of the country on Friday and Thursday.

The disaster is described as one of the worst-ever calamities since the 2003 floods.

See more at: http://www.dailymirror.lk/article/Update-killed-in-weather-calamity–129692.html#sthash.tVT0J37T.dpuf

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Philip Maisel’s Oral History of Jewish Holocaust Experiences

Jewish Holocaust Centre, Melbourne ….  http://www.jhc.org.au/museum/collections/survivor-testimonies.html

The JHC has over 1300 video testimonies as well as over 200 audio testimonies in its collection. These provide eyewitness accounts of the horrors of the Holocaust, as well as glimpses into the vibrancy of pre-war Jewish life in Europe. The collection is widely used by researchers and students of oral history, the Holocaust and a variety of other disciplines. The testimonies’ project began in the 1980s as the Melbourne Oral History Project, established by Sandra Cowan and Jenny Wajsenberg and later co-ordinated by the late Anne Bernhaut. They conducted over 200 audio recordings of Holocaust survivors.

 Phillip Maisel has been recording a testimony of Holocaust survivors for 25 years. (ABC News: Peter Drought)

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Angie, 12-Year Old Rock-Climbing Maestro

Greg Bearup, courtesy of The Weekend Australian 29 April 2017, where the title is “Top of Her Grade”

n 1976, a 14-year-old Romanian gymnast named Nadia Comaneci stormed into the Montreal Olympics with the first-ever perfect score of 10. Gymnastics would never be the same again. Comaneci did things that had never been done and in doing so vastly increased the level of skill, and the risks, for all those who would follow. She made gymnastics more spectacular and infinitely more dangerous. Greg Mortimer reckons the sport of rock climbing is undergoing a similar “paradigm shift”. Leading this revolution, he says, is a 12-year-old climber from the Blue Mountains, NSW, called Angie Scarth-Johnson. “She is breaking all the rules,” Mortimer says. “She’s just freakishly good.”

  Angie climbig –http://www.onsight.com.au/2013/12/angie/

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Bomb Blast as Ideological Assertion

Raffaello Pantucci, courtesy of The Telegraph, 23 May 2017, where the title isCars and knives are easier to use, but bombs will always be central to terrorist thinking” **

Terrorism has a predictable brutality to it. And yet, the idea of a bombing is something that still surprises us when it happens. The attack in Manchester in some ways appears a flashback to a different time when the terrorists we worried about detonated bombs, rather than using vehicles as rams or stabbing people. The reality is that terrorism’s only constant is its desire to shock and kill. For any group or ideology, the fundamental point is to make yourself heard as dramatically as possible. Groups and individuals will use whatever tools they have to gain that attention.

 The successful use of a bomb is unusual among recent terror attacks CREDIT: JOEL GOODMAN/LNP

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Hear Ye! Hear Ye! Heed Raffaello Pantucci on Homegrown Jihadism

Greg Sheridanin The Australian, 24 May 2017, where the title is “Manchester Terror Attack: Endless Cycle of Jihadism” … with emphasis by highlights being the intervention of The Editor, Thuppahi

A crowd of mostly teenage girls, as innocent as young people can be, at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester. It’s everything jihadist terrorists — from Islamic State to al-Qa’ida to the Taliban — hate most about the West, and everything that declares the innocence of youth and the pleasure of music in public spaces. The savage attack — believed to have been carried out by a lone male suicide bomber, leaving at least 22 dead, 60 injured and more fatalities likely — demonstrates the stark realities of the terrorism war. First, the terror threat in Western societies is not diminishing. Every so often the West gets weary of the terror story, develops terrorism fatigue and wants to declare the peak of the threat has passed. This is not true.

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Jane Russell on Sri Lankan Political History in Debate with Kumarasingham’s Readings

From London the historian and scholar  Jane Russell has entered an extensive set of comments on Harshan Kumarasingham’s Heidelberg essay of 2013 –reprinted in Thuppahi in 2014. Given its length and Russell’s background (see below) it deserves wider exposure in the hope that debate will be promoted. I am therefore deleting its original location and posting it as a separate item.

 Russell  Kumarasingham

  1. HARSHAN KUMARASINGHAM”s “The Deceptive Tranquillity surrounding Sri Lankan Independence: ‘The Jewel of the East yet has its Flaws’,”  is an interesting paper with which I broadly agree, despite a tendency by the author to sacrifice judgement in favour of rhetoric. However, Dr. Harshan Kumarasingham has gone for the elegant historical narrative rather than seeking to explore and analyse some of the more nuanced, underlying factors that may help to understand the spiralling of Ceylon, cited by the British as ‘ the Premier Crown Colony” at independence in 1947, into Sri Lanka, characterised by the west at the turn of the 21st century as a terrorist-riven semi-failed state. I hope the following will help to redress this.

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