The Foreign and Commonwealth Office hosted talks yesterday with members of the Sri Lankan community in the UK. Hosted by Des Browne MP, the Prime Minister's Special Envoy to Sri Lanka, and Mike Foster MP, DfID Permanent Under-Secretary of State, the meeting was attended by 25 members of the Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim and Bergher communities from across the UK.
This article describes a Tamil Typewriter that was acquired in 1937 by
K.N. Sundaresan, a prolific writer of plays and poems in Tamil and English. The typewriter was manufactured in Germany. It had some novel, distinctive and ingenious features which are of historical and archival interest.
K.N. Sundaresan or KNS (1899-1983), a gold medallist in M.A.
(Mathematics) from Tamil Nadu, worked as a teacher of Mathematics in
Berhampur (now in Orissa) from 1921-1967 (see photo taken c 1950).
The Committee to Protect Journalists is greatly concerned by ongoing threats to Sri Lanka’s journalists and media organizations. Anonymous letters with death threats, at left, recently sent to Sunday Leader Editor-in-Chief Frederica Jansz and News Editor Munza Mushtaq echo those that ended in the death of the paper’s founder, Lasantha Wickramatunga, in January.
“Our concern is that these most recent threats, like so many others, and the deaths of 11 journalists since President Mahinda Rajapaksa came to power in 2006, will remain unexplained and those behind them will remain unprosecuted,” said Bob Dietz, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “The air of impunity surrounding violence against the media is having a chilling effect on journalists.”
Outspoken Sri Lankan female journalist Dileesha Abeysundera who works for the Sinhala-language edition of the Sunday Leader had come under threat by unknown gangsters. The newspaper has suffered numerous serious attacks on its staff and offices in the past.
Conservative Ministers, Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, the Hon. Jason Kenney, Minister of International Cooperation, the Hon. Bev Oda, Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Americas, the Hon. Peter Kent and Oak Ridges-Markham Member of Parliament, Paul Calandra, met with members of the Tamil-Canadian community at a roundtable today.
