Cass was well aware we were in the second wave of Covid-19 infection with a Ukrainian pilot bringing in a more ferociously spreading variant which spread to the Brandix factory and Peliyagoda fish market, but she managed to muster hope that the dawn of 2021 would usher in a decline of the wave and also rejuvenate those who govern us and those of the Presidential Task Force to regain the strength they exhibited when the pandemic first came to Sri Lanka, of course minus Dr Jasinghe, who we all admired but was given a kick to serve in a Ministry alien to him, his training and proven ability. So there was a glimmer of hope and a lessoning of gloom and doom. But, and here is the damning BUT – optimism was doused, hopes crushed and expectation from powers that be to lead the country to overcome the wave was dashed and smashed. Utter despondency descended when hordes of Ukrainian tourists were welcomed at the Mattala airport with dance and drums and Udayanga Weeratunge prominently present
By Gwynne Dyer On Monday morning, a British judge finally rejected the US attempt to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and jail him forever (or at least for 175 years in a high-security ‘supermax’ prison) on the grounds that he is, as Joe Biden once called him, a “high-tech terrorist”. The vindictiveness of the American […]
By Sajitha Prematunge
Oblivious to the laws of physics and before he could even grasp the meaning of the word velocity, he tried to calculate the speed of the bus he was travelling in, by taking into account how long it took the bus to travel between two lamp posts. He was just seven years old then. By grade three he was trying to calculate the light year longhand. It’s not rocket science, it was just a matter of multiplying how far light travelled in a second, by how many seconds there are in a year. But for an eight-year-old to even entertain such an idea, while his peers were still playing cops and robbers, is uncanny.
By Sajitha Prematunge and Lalantha Wanniarachchi
Tall and stout by Sri Lankan standards, Samantha, was quite oblivious to her historical significance. She is the first artificially inseminated foal in Sri Lanka. From the former Director of Forestry and Environment Division, Mahaweli Authority turned breeder, Palitha Samarakoon, who tried to get mare Thulvaan to conceive but in vain, to the veterinary team at Peradeniya University, Veterinary Science Faculty, the coming of the now happy and healthy filly was something akin to childbirth. Samantha was the culmination of years of hard work and months of anxious anticipation.
A casual conversation with Peradeniya University, Veterinary Science Faculty, Senior Lecturer Prof Basil Alexander convinced Samarakoon that artificially inseminating a mare was not altogether impossible. Ten doses of semen, of Arabian pedigree, were brought from a stud farm in California at Rs 100,000 each. Thulvaan of the seventh generation from Upali Wijewarden