Yashee Sharma & Jorge Bianco
An Air India plane headed for London has crashed with more than 240 people on board, including 61 foreign nationals, in the north-west Indian city of Ahmedabad, in Gujarat state.
Yashee Sharma & Jorge Bianco
An Air India plane headed for London has crashed with more than 240 people on board, including 61 foreign nationals, in the north-west Indian city of Ahmedabad, in Gujarat state.
Filed under life stories, world events & processes
A NOTE From Wade Frazier, June 2025
Hi Michael: Well, my LinkedIn bio gives my professional background, if that is what you mean by a CV………………………………………………….. https://www.linkedin.com/in/wade-frazier-6b539a10b/
Born in 1958 in Seattle. My most important activities (at least to me!:) was my involvement in the energy industry in the 1980s. We had the world’s best heating system (it still is). We also pursued free energy before we were wiped out, and my partner went to prison. The CIA offered my partner $1 billion to fold our operation before we had the boom lowered on us. My story regarding those events is generally unbelievable. One of my many accounts is here: https://ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#hitting
Factum EPIGS Summit, Colombo, Sri Lanka, 11–12 June 2025**
THE PANELISTS
o Rohana Hettiarachchi (Sri Lanka) – Executive Director of People’s Action for Free and Fair Elections (PAFFREL)
o Che De Los Reyes (The Philippines) – Journalist and Media Development Specialist
o Aishath Adnan (The Maldives) – Co-Founder of Women in Tech Maldives
o Harindra Dassanayake (Sri Lanka) Co-Founder of Muragala
o Dulanjaya Mahagamage (Sri Lanka) – Manager – Social Media and Research at Hashtag Generation
o Usama Khilji (Pakistan) – Co-Founder and Director of Bolo Bhi and the Vice Chair of the Global Network Initiative
• Moderator – Rajni Gamage (Sri Lanka) – Research Fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS), National University of Singapore (NUS).
Saroj Pathirana in FACEBOOK, June 2025
A large group of top-level leaders, ministers, princes, and top-level leaders have gathered in France’s port Nice (Nice) to attend the United Nations Third World Ocean Conference.
As several leaders approached Nice city by ship, a massive ship from the Greenpeace Environmental Organization named Arctic Sunrise was also approaching the city to protest against cannings happening at the bottom.
Samoa State, which made the first announcement to start the conference, announced 9 new sea regions fully insured, protecting 30% of its own seaside. Accordingly, fishing of 36,000 square kilometers is strictly prohibited. And the Samoa Island State’s warning is to fully start its ocean zone into a sustainable management system by 2030.
We will bring further details about this week-long conference, courtesy of Ocean Reporting Network at Pulitzer Centre.
Rex Clementine
Exactly 50 years ago to this day, Sri Lanka played their first ever international cricket match. It was the 1975 World Cup and it indeed was a baptism by fire; bowled out for 86 by West Indies.
Anura Tennekoon and Clive Lloyd at the toss.
Filed under life stories, self-reflexivity, sri lankan society, unusual people
Alan Gardner in ESPNcricinfo, June 2025
England 188 for 6 (Buttler 96) beat West Indies 167 for 9 (Lewis 39, Dawson 4-20) by 21 runs
Filed under accountability, life stories
Prefatory Note by Michael Roberts in Adelaide, 7 June 2025
Brian Victoria was a colleague teaching Japanese in the Asian Studies Department when I moved to Adelaide Univerisity Anthropology in 1977; and we got to know each other at seminars and in faculty corridors. He moved abroad subsequently. While his expertise probably lies in political issues in the Pacific theatre, one of my brainwaves — rare nowadays — led me to seek his appraisal of the deadly, devastating and unholy conflicts occurring in recent years in Gaza, Palestine, Israel,and their surrounds (an issue piercing TPS because of a sharp division of opinion between two of my friends, David Schokman and Arlen van Der Wall).
A Note from Errol Fernando, early June 2025 **
Dear Michael, I listened to a very interesting interview on Late Night Live recently which dealt with the whole story of Merle Oberon and her genealogy. Please google Late Night Live and listen to this interview which tells you about her Sri Lankan mother, her efforts to hide her ethnicity, pretending that she was born in Tasmania, etc, etc.
The Wikipedia Disclosures …. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merle_Oberon
Merle Oberon with Laurence Olivier in in Wuthering Heights (1939)
Merle Oberon (born Estelle Merle O’Brien Thompson; 19 February 1911 – 23 November 1979) was a British actress. She began her acting career in British cinema in the early 1930s, with a breakout role in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933). She later moved to Hollywood, where she became an international star, earning acclaim for films such as The Dark Angel (1935), Wuthering Heights (1939), and That Uncertain Feeling (1941). Her career spanned from the 1920s to the 1970s, primarily in English-language films produced in the UK and the U.S. Her performance as Kitty Vane in The Dark Angel earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
An Item passed on by Jayantha Somasundaram of Canberra, June 2025 … with highlights imposed by The Editor, Thuppahi
Merle Oberon (born Estelle Merle O’Brien Thompson; 19 February 1911 – 23 November 1979) was raised as the daughter of Arthur Terrence O’Brien Thompson, a Welsh mechanical engineer from Darlington who worked in Indian Railways, and his wife, Charlotte Selby (whose full name was Constance Charlotte Thompson, according to her 1937 obituary), who was born in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and was a Burgher from British Ceylon.
Filed under historical interpretation, life stories, unusual people