Features
Prospective Democrat Veep of the US of America
At a recent dinner with friends who keep close tabs on local and overseas politics, one said that Kamala Harris’ chosen running mate, Tim Walz, had a handicapped son. Googling, I came across the picture of a boy who does not look perfectly normal. The caption read “’That’s my Dad’: Tim Walz’s son Gus gives tearful reaction to speech”. The speech was Walz’ acceptance of running with Harris in the presidential race, delivered at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago on the third day of the four-day convention: August 21, 2004.
My interest was aroused, not curiosity certainly, and I gut felt Harris’ choice was a good one. Reading his detailed biography it was proven that he is a simple, kindly, sensible person with fellow feeling and different from the usual American. Also poles apart from Trump and his elite though decadent coterie of associates. Note I avoid using term ‘coterie of friends’. As was said by one of the speakers at the DNC, Trump has no friends, he is his only friend. Walz has used the word weird to describe Trump and that has stuck and is much used.
I listened to Tim Walz’s acceptance speech and my feeling of him being a good man was completely justified. He gave many personal details, even of the intense seven years of anxiety he and his wife endured when they were on fertility drugs. They named their first child Hope. Three years later Gus was born. Walz did not mention it but pictures of Gus showed him to be having Down Syndrome, very probably. The two kids, now teens, were seen in the video I watched, in tears as they listened and applauded their father. In his speech Walz said it was the honour of his life to be selected as Kamala Harris’s running mate. Who is this man was the burning question for me.
Biographical facts
Timothy James Walz, born April 6, 1964, in West Point, Nebraska, came from almost a village of very few people, who he mentioned were always concerned about each other. His father James Walz was superintendent of a town school and wife Darlene, a homemaker.
The father was also a Korean War veteran. Life was idyllic for Tim and his brother – playing football, basketball and golf, sometimes bus riding hundreds of miles to compete against other
schools in sports. His father contracted lung cancer being a chain smoker, and died in 1984. The family descended to impecunity with unpaid medical bills. Walz mentioned a social security clause they benefited from and survived. Hence his insistence on state help to families in financial difficulties and health benefits which he made law as Governor of Minnesota and promises to assist legislation that Kamala Harris proposes within these issues.
After high school at age 17, Walz joined the Army National Guard and served for 24 years. He also worked in a factory. He later graduated from Chadron State College in Nebraska. Mother and two sons moved to Texas and Tim enrolled at the University of Houston to follow East Asian studies. He went to Arkansas to work and returned in 1987. He then went to China as a teacher soon after the Tiananmen Square massacre whose aftermath affected him. He returned to his village in Nebraska in 1993 and was voted an outstanding teacher. Falling in love with co-teacher Gwen Whipple (b 1966), they were married in 1994 and moved to live in Gwen’s home state – Minnesota. By now he had his Master’s degree in education. Added to his teaching, he undertook coaching football.
He signed nomination papers to run for a House of Representative seat while a keen campaign worker for John Kerry. He was elected in 2007 and served as Congressman till 2019. He opposed the Iraq war. When in 2013 there occurred a government shutdown, he did not take his salary until the House of Reps resumed its sessions. He was reelected to the House five times before being elected 41st governor of Minnesota in 2018 and reelected in 2022.
What he stands for
Particularly during his second term as Governor, “he pushed for and signed a wide range of legislation, including tax modifications, free school meals, bolstering state infrastructure, universal gun background checks, codifying abortion rights and free college tuition for low-income families.”
It is clearly seen that he is a humane person who used his position to improve the lot of the less privileged. Also remembering his family’s travails, he has done much to help in health issues where persons get into debt because of the long illness of a family member. State security help is available to them, as it was to his mother when she was widowed. During his acceptance speech he elaborated on these issues. As Governor, he reduced taxes so the life of the middle class improved. He mentioned that all school children are given two meals in school: breakfast and lunch. He admitted he possesses a gun and is a proponent for allowing responsible adults to possess a firearm but insisted on strict controls and he mentioned that with Kamala Harris as Prez, there would be no shootings in schools.
He is for freedom of women to choose whether to continue a pregnancy or resort to a legal abortion if the foetus is the result of rape or is abnormal or she cannot afford to have a child. Free higher education for children from less affluent families is a great benefit in the State he is governor of, as many are not able to afford university tuition fees; a scheme better than loans being taken while in university and having to repay them whether employed or not soon after leaving university.
The lowering of taxes and helping the less affluent is also one of Harris’ principle aims in leading the US, also ensuring the right to abortion and freedom of choice of women in their sexual lives. In her speech or Walz’s it was stated that Trump-appointed judges rescinded the freedom given women to choose to have a child or not, ensured by the Roe vs Wade judgment of January 23, 1973. This states: “The Supreme Court decided that the right to privacy implied in the 14th Amendment protected abortion as a fundamental right. However the government retained the power to regulate or restrict abortion access depending on the stage of pregnancy.”
On August 6, Vice President Kamala Harris announced Tim Walz as her running mate in the November presidential elections. There were three final contestants whom she interviewed, it was said, and she selected the Governor of the State of Minnesota. Reading about him, seeing him and his family on video and listening to his acceptance speech, one is fully convinced she’s made the best choice since he shares the issues she is passionate about, emerges as a very humane person, and as he repeatedly said, “you have to see to your neighbor.”
Additionally he is an environmentalist and very concerned about global warming and more than fair to tribal persons and Native Americans. He even considered a simple problem of girls from less well to do families and passed a state law in 2023 that girl students be given free sanitary supplies which earned him the nickname Tampon Tim. He supports LGBTQ rights and the legalization of the use of cannabis. How more wisely liberal can one get?
Personal facts: born a Catholic he changed religion to his wife’s loyalty to the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Charged with drunk driving in 1995, he foreswore alcohol permanently.
Another plus point sharply in contrast to Trump and run of the mill Republicans, he is comparatively poor. He and wife have no stocks, bonds or securities, no interest paying investments. His earnings are remuneration for the political post he holds and their joint pensions as teachers. He also gets a pension from National Guards. No wonder he said in his speech on August 21, “Donald Trump’s not fighting for you or your family. He never sat at that kitchen table like the one I grew up at, wondering how we were going to pay the bills.”
Tim Walz at the end of his acceptance speech said he has not made many public speeches, but he ended on a rousing note and to describe the political struggle ahead he used football jargon – “… our job is to tackle.” Asking those present to contribute their effort, he said “one call at a time, one ten dollar donation at a time… We have 76 days to move forward. Then we will turn the page on Trump.” He assured that Kamala Harris had solutions to problems of housing, medi-care and would ensure human rights. To his resounding cry of “When we fight” the audience shouted “We win” repeatedly.
It looks as if the United States of America will be in safe hands with Harris and Walz at the helm – she a Black American with an Indian mother who she is inordinately proud of and indebted to, and he a simple man with mixed blood – German, Swedish and Irish, the last probed and identified to be that an ancestor of his came from Kilmore, a village in south County Wexford, Republic of Ireland.
It may be some time before the full impact of food inflation is felt in the West. Until such time the world would continue to keep itself in suspense over whether the Trump administration is in earnest when it seeks to convey the impression that it is backing a negotiated solution in West Asia.
As is usually the case, consumer stress would be one of the final determinants of political change. To the degree to which the average US consumer somehow ‘muddles through’ and puts the food on the table, to the same extent would the Republican sections of the US public in particular be tolerant of the Trump administration’s inconsistent handling of the West Asian war and the main issues stemming from it. That is, there would be no grave popular disaffection and a demand for political change in the short term.
However, the indications are that the Trump administration’s support base is suffering some erosion in the wake of the current economic crisis. While reports indicate that Democratic sections are firming-up their opposition to the political centre, Republican support for Trump is also showing signs of waning, we are given to understand.
The above developments are probably why Trump is on record as having given Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a ‘dressing down’ recently on his seeming intransigence on the question of giving negotiations a chance in West Asia. The show of displeasure could be really aimed by Trump at containing the impatience of the American public.
However, the current ground situation in the Middle East, particularly the uncontained bloodshed, is likely to impress on the thinking sections of the world that more than temporary political change is needed in West Asia and the US.
A well thought out political solution that addresses all the contentious issues at the heart of the Middle East conflict is what enlightened opinion would demand, and very rightly. Right now, the ‘peace efforts’ initiated by the Trump administration give the impression of being piecemeal solutions at best.
There have been, of course, numerous initiatives in the past aimed at bringing permanent peace to the Middle East. These failed mainly because they did not address in full the root causes of the conflict.
At bottom the Middle East conflict is mainly about race and religious hate bred by socio-economic and material inequalities. For instance, if the Palestinian people were not displaced and deprived of land occupied by them at the time of the founding of the Israeli state, ethnic enmities would not have grown to the current unmanageable proportions.
When addressing the above questions, though, it must be remembered that the Israelis too were a displaced people who were entitled to land and a state of their own in the Middle East. Basically, out of these seemingly irreconcilable and conflicting demands have grown the Middle East imbroglio.
Middle East peace is considerably about reconciling these demands and arriving at a solution that would ensure the creation of two states that would opt for peaceful co-existence thereafter.
As long as the US does not see the need for a non-partisan solution that addresses the needs of both ethnicities and religions and goes all-out, as it were, to have it implemented, the Middle East would continue to bleed.
However, staunching the blood flow through the creation of two states would be only half the job done, though a very important part of it. More pernicious, pervasive and difficult to remedy are the inter-ethnic and inter-religious hatreds that have been unleashed over the decades.
However, if substantial, long-lasting peace is to be fostered in the region the latter ‘demons’ would need to be exorcised from the hearts and minds of the communities concerned. No doubt an uphill task but one that must be undertaken by those who wish the region well.
The UN would need to put its ‘best foot forward’ in such undertakings but it is time that it dawned on the international community and other caring quarters that Middle East peace, and all other such uphill challenges, require proactive peacemaking on the part of all civilized sections for their effective management. That is, public involvement in peacemaking too is a must.
Since hatreds are harboured in the human consciousness the enmities embedded in the latter need to be managed and defused judiciously alongside other undertakings in a peace process. In the case of West Asia, such enmities could be even spread globe-wide besides being multi-dimensional. For instance, it ought to be thought-provoking that Iran is insistent on a peace initiative that would also include Lebanon.
Besides security considerations it is also ethnic and religious affiliations that account for Iran making this demand. For instance, the Shias are a numerically important religious community in Lebanon and they provide a significant number of Hizbollah fighters, who are in a vital sense carrying out a ‘proxy war’ for Iran. It also needs to be factored in that Iran is a Shia-majority country.
Thus trans-border religious affiliations could add to the complexities and enormity of ethno-religious conflicts. However, the task of managing centuries-long enmities needs to be launched and prodded on with by peacemakers since a downing of arms alone would not guarantee substantive peace.
It is not realized sufficiently that the process of ending hatreds begins with mutual apologies by antagonists to a conflict for the harm inflicted on each other. This would be anathema in some ears but there is no getting away from the requirement. It is the vital first step to permanent peace anywhere.
In fact there could be no reconciliation worth speaking of without such mutual apologies. It is a point worth re-iterating in these times when even the government of Sri Lanka is voicing the need for national reconciliation. Well, without the words, ‘I am sorry’, there could be no permanent end to enmities – they would do well to remember.
The above requirements may not go down very well with governments, but they resonate in the hearts and minds of most people, since they are inheritors of religious traditions of some kind.
This is a principal reason why peacemaking works well when publics too are involved in them. The effectiveness of such campaigns increases several fold when they have a Mahatma Gandhi or a Jawaharlal Nehru at their helm. A strong proactive involvement by the public in peace could lead to the emergence of such leaders at some point in these campaigns.
Official Digital Partner of the 2026 ‘Dakshina Prabha’ National Vesak Zone
Dialog Axiata PLC, Sri Lanka’s #1 connectivity provider, collaborated with the Ministry of Buddha Sasana, Religious and Cultural Affairs to bring one of Sri Lanka’s largest and most technologically advanced Vesak experiences to the ‘Dakshina Prabha’ National Vesak Zone. The three-day celebration, in Matara attracted more than hundred thousand visitors, who engaged with a series of innovative digital activities powered by Dialog 5G Ultra, including Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Reality (VR) experiences, digital pandols and a Data Dansala. The opening ceremony was attended by Hon. Sunil Handunnetti, Minister of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development and Hon. Saroja Savithri Paulraj, Minister of Women and Child Affairs, along with distinguished guests and Dialog’s senior management.
One of the key attractions at the venue was the Dialog 5G Ultra-powered Virtual Reality (VR) experience, which attracted more than 35,000 participants. The activation enabled devotees to virtually visit and pay homage to sacred Buddhist sites, including the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi in India and the Atamasthana in Anuradhapura, directly from the Vesak zone in Matara.
Visitors receive complimentary mobile data through Dialog’s QR-powered Data Dansala.
Dialog also conducted an AI Digital Vesak Greeting Card Competition from 21 May to 01 June 2026, attracting numerous entries from across the country. The shortlisted designs were showcased across 20 large LED screens throughout the venue and across Matara City, and were also made available for download via mobile devices. Further, through the use of AI, traditional Jathaka Katha were reimagined in a digital format, demonstrating how technology can be used to preserve and enhance cultural and religious heritage. Together, these initiatives blended traditional Vesak celebrations with emerging technologies, offering visitors a unique and immersive way to engage with Vesak traditions.
Extending the spirit of Vesak through connectivity, Dialog conducted a special Data Dansala powered by its QR Reload platform, enabling visitors to receive complimentary mobile data by scanning QR codes placed across the venue. In addition to the Matara National Vesak Zone, similar Data Dansala activations were also conducted at the Gangaramaya and Bauddhaloka Vesak zones in Colombo.Visitors also had the opportunity to create personalised Vesak-themed digital photos through an AI Photo Booth, generating AI-enhanced portraits using their own photographs and adding a contemporary digital element to the Vesak celebrations.
Visitors watch AI-generated Jathaka Katha
Commenting on the initiative, Hon. Sunil Handunnetti, Minister of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development, said, “The 2026 Dakshina Prabha Vesak Festival marked the first time AI-powered digital innovations were incorporated into a National Vesak Festival in Sri Lanka. Presenting Buddhist stories and teachings through technology created a new and engaging way for visitors to connect with these traditions. We thank Dialog for supporting this initiative and for working closely with us to bring our vision to life. Their contribution played an important role in making this first-of-its-kind event a reality.”
Lasantha Theverapperuma, Group Chief Marketing Officer of Dialog Axiata PLC said, “We thank the Government of Sri Lanka for the opportunity to support the 2026 Dakshina Prabha National Vesak Festival and for embracing technology as part of this year’s celebrations. As the Official Digital Partner, we were privileged to contribute through our Dialog 5G Ultra and AI capabilities, creating new ways for visitors to engage with Vesak traditions while preserving their cultural significance for future generations.”
Beyond supporting the National Vesak Zone in Matara, Dialog also enhanced the Gangaramaya and Bauddhaloka Vesak zones through a range of digital activations during the Vesak season. The company additionally continued its sustainability initiatives, including the Thirasara Aloka Poojawa, which illuminated rural places of worship through solar-powered lighting solutions.
Universal Woman is an international pageant focused on “beauty, elegance, and talent” for women, positioning itself as a platform to shape global ambassadors. The 2026 edition will be held in Cambodia, and Sri Lanka will be there, as well.
According to reports coming my way, contestants, at the international event, will work with industry trailblazers, under international standards.
Sri Lankan supermodel, runway and pageant trainer Chulpadmendra Kumarapathirana, is the National Director for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026.
With over two decades in the industry, Chula was crowned Miss Sri Lanka 2006, and has since shaped the next generation of titleholders through her Colombo-based Chulpadmendra Catwalk Studio, widely regarded as one of the country’s leading modelling academies.
The team behind Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026
A former host of Derana Miss Sri Lanka for Miss World 2008 and a judge for Miss Universe Sri Lanka 2025, Chula now serves as National Director for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026, leading the franchise’s search for Sri Lanka’s delegate to the international final in Cambodia.
Applications for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 are being taken, via WhatsApp: 077 659 4994, says Chula.
The judging panel for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 includes Senaka De Silva, Pageant Aesthetic Advisor & Chairperson of the Judging Panel, Angela Seneviratne, Caroline Jurie, Rozelle Plunkett, and Suraj Mapa.
Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 officially began its journey with a first round of auditions, held in Colombo, marking the start of an exciting new chapter in Sri Lanka’s pageant industry.
Launching the first round of auditions
The platform aims to empower women while selecting an intelligent, confident, and inspiring representative to compete at the Universal Woman International Pageant 2026 in Cambodia, this September.
Universal Woman Sri Lanka now moves forward with the vision of creating one of the country’s most prestigious and empowering pageants while preparing to crown a queen who will proudly represent Sri Lanka on the international stage.
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