Features
“… And death will have its day” Shakespeare

Hearing of the death of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, on Saturday April 10 was like losing a family member. I acknowledged to myself that was strange for who are we to the Royal Family – the House of Windsor – not even their Commonwealth subjects now. But there was that transitory sorrow and the desire to listen to the details of his life as presented on BBC, and read about him. I found later that a young Lankan man, now domiciled in the US, felt the same. “I felt sad on hearing he had died, though he lived long enough.”
This direct descendant of Queen Victoria, a Greek Prince, gave up his citizenship and his name and became British. Much of it, as also the proposed marriage to Princess Elizabeth, was maneuvered by his ambitious uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten. Princess Elizabeth conveniently fell in love with the dashingly handsome Naval Officer, Philip, when on a visit to the British fleet with her father King George VI, the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret. She was 13 when first attracted, and he a mature 19, already in the Royal Navy.
The Netflix film series of the House of Windsor/Mountbatten
I also ascribe his death being like the goodbye of a person known, as I had watched the Netflix film series The Crown which traces the life of the Queen from childhood up with Clair Foy playing the Princess and young Queen and Olivia Coleman playing the aging sovereign, brilliantly. Incidentally Tobias Menzies who played the role of the Duke in series three and four resembled the Prince more than the younger Matt Smith. The Crown is claimed to be true to life and therefore warts being shown, plus of course the incidents that prove the Queen’s regality, constancy, dedication and dealing tactfully with her stubbornly rash sister, five Prime Ministers including Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, when personalities clashed just a wee bit.
And then the annus horribilis – year of disaster and misfortune of family divorces and fire at Windsor Castle. In all these personal and national travails, Prince Philip stood steadily by her side; in public one step behind, and she leaned on him though steely strong herself. She acknowledged this fact and her gratitude to him on many occasions. It is accepted that Philip steered the Royal Family through troublous times. I include here Tobias Menzies’ tribute to the Duke on hearing of his death:
“If I know anything about the Duke of Edinburgh I’m fairly sure he wouldn’t want an actor who portrayed him on TV giving his opinion on his life, so I’ll leave it to Shakespeare. ‘O good old man! How well on thee appears the constant service of the antique world. When service sweat for duty, not for need. Thou art not for the fashion of these times where none will sweat but for promotion, and having that do choke their service up even with the having. It is not so with thee;’” (As You Like It – Orlando in Act 2, Sc 3)
When the Navy Officer Philip was questioned by King George VI, who with his wife did not quite approve of this seeker of their daughter’s hand in marriage due to his penury and family connections to Germany, he promised he would always stand by Elizabeth, care for her and protect her. Which he did. It was no easy task for a strong man to be consort and play second fiddle to the Queen of Great Britain, and far flung Commonwealth countries which accepted her sovereignty. She told her parents she would marry Philip and no other and the love story unsentimentally yet sincerely continued for 70 years.
Poignant and revealing
I remember well the narrative in the series of The Crown of one of his rumoured major discretions. His physio invited him for a weekend party convincing him he was under mental stress and needed relaxation and diversion. Thus while the Queen had to travel alone to Sandringham, he went off with a couple of men for a weekend of golf and drinking. It was on this occasion that Christine Keeler who rocked the political stability of Britain with her ‘charms’, was present. Photographs had been surreptitiously taken and in one, the Prince’s rear view was seen.
Princess Margaret stormed into Queen Elizabeth’s solitary breakfast with the newspaper published picture and said there was no mistaking her husband having been partying. What followed was so revealing. The Queen was devastated emotionally but was completely stoic. She was seated on a window sill in Buckingham Palace when Philip came in. She was aloof. He knelt by her and apologized. Then he sat on the window sill himself. Slowly she moved her hand to his extended arm. And he said: “I promised your father I would care for you? Haven’t I done that all these years?”
Early Life
He was born in Corfu in 1921. The following year, his father, Prince Andrew of Greece, was banished from the country. The family was taken to Italy on board a British naval destroyer. The baby Philip slept in a cradle made from a box that had been used to store oranges. For the next ten years or so, he lived a peripatetic existence, with no fixed home. His mother, Princess Alice, was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and consigned to a sanatorium. (Later, she sheltered Jews in Athens during the German occupation and was honored, in 1994, as Righteous Among the Nations).
Prince Andrew, the father, exited to Monte Carlo to live with a mistress. He left nothing to his children. Netflix’s BBC-approved The Crown showed that his mother, now a nun, was invited to stay with their family in Buckingham Palace, the move being more Queen Elizabeth’s. He somewhat ignored his mother, who was befriended by Princess Anne. Later, the film shows Philip walking with her to the garden beside her quarters. She died December 5, 1964 aged 84 in Buckingham Palace and was buried in St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, and in 1988 in the Church of Mary Magdalene, Gethsemane, Jerusalem.
All four of Philip’s sisters married Germans. One of the sisters died in 1937 with her entire family in a plane crash. He attended her funeral amid throngs of Germans giving the Nazi salute. None of them was invited for his wedding, though his mother was present, later at the coronation of the Queen, dressed in a sort of nun’s habit designed by her.
When the Duke was asked whether he had been traumatized by his fractured upbringing, with so much turmoil, he replied: “My family broke up. My mother was ill. My sisters were married, my father was in the South of France, I just had to get on with it. You do, One does.” However,the Mountbattens in Britain took him over and then his uncle Dickie, Lord Louise Mountbatten, his wife and two female cousins, welcomed him. Lord Mountbatten continued the role of mentor and advisor and later shifted to Prince Charles who was completely devastated when Lord Louis died at the hands of the IRA while sailing.
Gaffes and quotes and doing good
Of course Prince Philip had his quirks, mostly through being frank verbally. Many are the undiplomatic comments of his. “I would very much like to go to Russia,” he said at the height of the Cold War, “although the bastards murdered half my family.” I distinctly heard on TV Prince Philip give vent to annoyance at one of his final public appearances of meeting a special group of soldiers. He and others were seated while all else stood behind. The cameraman was fussing.
Then came Prince Philip loud and clear: “Take that f….. picture!” (The f-word pronounced full).
“That fierce and funny view of the world was at once a boon and a curse. It both stood Philip in good stead and, notoriously landed him in trouble which made headlines and drew accusations of racism. …. There is no denying the pressure was there from the start, long before he was forced to become a liege.” Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, said: “He consistently put the interest of others ahead of his own.”
In the New Yorker of April 9, Anthony Lane titled his article – ‘Prince Philip‘s death is the last embers of British Stoicism.” Lane wrote: “That is indisputably true and was demonstrated for decades by the sight of Philip patrolling in the slipstream of the Queen, like a frigate in the wake of an aircraft carrier – a step or two behind her, to one side with his hands diplomatically clasped behind his back. To maintain that secondary position without tiring requires a formidable level of self control, especially in a man who had once as a naval officer enjoyed command of a ship. Renouncing his own career in 1951, he was required to kneel before Her Majesty, at her coronation, two years later, and swear to be ‘liege man of life and limb.’”
He was also, considering Prince Charles’ life, too strict in his upbringing of the heir to the throne. By any measure sending him to the Spartan boarding life at Gordonstone, which he had enjoyed but was near traumatic to the sensitive Charles, was a mistake. However, to compensate, as seen in The Crown, he tried to sort things out between Charles and Diana when cracks appeared in their marriage. He spoke to her as a father saying they were both strangers and aliens in the royal family that was so different to other families, but tradition and duty called for restraint, sacrifice and dignity. He had overcome strains and restraints by taking an interest in matters global (wild life), service (his help to young people) and for recreation to polo, after being a good cricketer.
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, was much more than that. He was an outstanding global figure with peculiarities tempering a stoic, strong personality.
Features
First leftist Mayor after NM: SJB, UNP beaten at their own game

What’s in a vote? That which we call a show of hands could still be as concealed as a secret vote. The newly elected Colombo Municipal Council has chosen the NPP’s Vraie Cally Balthazaar as the City’s new Mayor, but on a secret vote and not in an open show of hands. The secret vote route appears to have caused much consternation among the SJB-UNP opposition forces at the Town Hall. The latter openly preferred an open show and are blaming the secret vote for the defeat of their candidate Riza Zarook.
On the face of it, the NPP with 49 of the 117 Councillors has a more legitimate claim to have one of own as Mayor rather than the SJB with 29 Councillors. In what has been described as a “desperate move”, the SJB forged a mayoral united front by fusing its 29 members with the UNP’s 13, the SLPP’s five and the singular member of the People’s Alliance (whoever the PA now is).
The beefed up SJB mayoral front total of 48 was close enough to the NPP’s 49 for claims of legitimacy, and both sides needed the support at least another 11 or 10 from the remaining 20 members to get the required majority of 59 votes. In the secret vote, the NPP’s candidate presumably got 12 of the non-allied votes to get 61 votes in total. The SJB mayoral front got only six for a total 54 votes. Two votes, there’s no certainty as to whose, were rejected.
Would the result have gone the other way if this municipal conclave had decided on an open show instead of papal secrecy? You do not need supernatural powers to determine that. Let alone a clairvoyant like Gota’s Gnanaka! The commonplace supposition would be that a secret vote may have allowed secret transactions to secure support with hidden hands.
But no one is accusing the JVP-NPP of resorting to such time-(dis)honoured tactics perfected for over 75 years by the UNP and later copied by all others, and most vigorously by the Rajapaksas. If I remember right or not mistaken, the Sunday Times Political Editor made the point after the May LG elections that there was no hanky-panky meddling in the elections by the NPP government – unlike (this is my parentheses) all previous governments in all previous elections.
As well, we may turn the question around and ask about the insistence on an open show of hands as against a secret vote. Is it because the SJB is now all for keeping its hands clean and asking others to show their hands of support in the open without receiving undue incentives? OR is it because the SJB and its allies wanted to see in the open which of the NPP councillors, who may have been beneficiaries of earlier incentives, would now betray them and support the NPP candidate?
Put another way, was it a stratagem to ask for a show of hands to see the breach of loyalty in the open in spite of past IOUs? The latter hypothesis has greater credibility because of the blessings given to the SJB alliance by two former presidents representing two fallen political houses.
No matter what happened secretly and how, the eventual victory of Ms. Balthazar as NPP Mayor chalks up a rare non-UNP victory in the history of Colombo Town Hall politics. After independence there have been only two non-UNP Mayors in Colombo. The first came as a progressive breakthrough when NM Perera became Mayor in 1954. The second came as a comical farce in 2006, when Uvais Mohamed Imitiyas, the leader of an independent group put up by the UNP after its botched up list of candidates had been rejected by the Election Commissioner. Ms. Balthazar is also the City’s second female mayor in quick succession after Rosy Senanayake herself an old school UNPer.
In NM’s Footsteps
News commentaries on Ms. Balthazar’s victory have made mention of the fact that she is the first leftist Mayor of Colombo in 70 years. The first and the last leftist Mayor so far has been Dr. NM Perera, the LSSP leader. NM had been a CMC member from July 1948 and became Mayor on 13 August 1954 after the municipal election on 24 July 1954. A New York Times news report called him the world’s first Trotskyite Mayor, a tongue-in-cheek shot that was characteristic of the Cold War era.
An era that the world badly misses now with an unstoppable Netanyahu and TACO (Trump always chickens out) Trump running amok. In this instance, with Middle East burning, Trump has chickened out to the war schemes of Netanyahu.
Back to Colombo of the 1950s, the LSSP fared well in the LG elections of 1954 including Colombo, a number of Urban Councils and many village councils. In Colombo, NM was accompanied by a strong LSSP contingent that included stalwarts like Bernard Soysa Osmund Jayaratne and a well known architect of the era, J. E. Devapura. Some years ago, Stanley Abeynaike recounted the saga of NM’s Mayorship in the Sunday Observer. Last week, Nandana Weerarathne (Nandana Substack) has recalled the old NM story in the current context.
The initiatives that NM spearheaded as Mayor are worthy of emulation even today. The first order of business was ridding Town Hall of bribery and corruption and implementing a purposeful budget. He took on the private omnibus system within Colombo, replacing it by a public trolley-bus service; and started planning a public bus service for the city and suburban travellers in collaboration with the local authorities of Kolonnawa, Wattala, Dehiwela, Mount-Lavinia and Kotte. City cleanup, slum clearance, small housing schemes, upkeep of rental housing neglected by landlords, and transferring ownership of rental housing to tenants after 30 years of occupancy – were among the progressive measures that were rapidly rolled out during NM’s methodical mayorship.
But all those initiatives of NM riled up the landlords and the private bus owners, and through them the entire UNP government of Prime Minister Kotelawala. Sir John and his cabal were not going to let NM to be the Mayor of Colombo’s even as the country was heading to the general election in 1956. A conspiracy was hatched, and a resolution was passed at an emergency UNP meeting at Sri Kotha, the UNP headquarters, “to remove the Colombo Mayor, Dr. NM Perera.” Even the courts got in on the act to facilitate a resolution at Council against NM as Mayor.
When the resolution to remove NM as Mayor finally came to the floor, Bernard Soysa, Osmund Jayaratne and JE Devapura took turns speaking for hours on end against the resolution. They were hoping to run the clock until the Supreme Court ruling came. But to no avail, and the resolution was passed on October 1st, 1955 by a majority of two votes. One of them was the Communist Party’s Kotahena Member Anthony Marcellus who was brought over to the UNP to vote against NM. Orchestrating the moves was R. Premadasa (father of the current SJB leader) who was brought from outside to oversee matters inside, replacing then Deputy Mayor T. Rudra, who was obliged to resign. All of that in time for the April 1956 election that the UNP lost anyway.
Even the 2006 election of Uvais Mohamed Imitiyas, a political nondescript, as mayor, was the result of the backfiring of a UNP plan to prevent Vasudeva Nanayakkara, another LSSPer, from becoming Mayor. The UNP even got the better of Milinda Moragoda, one time Wickremesinghe confidant, when he chose to make a run for the Mayorship with the support of the Rajapaksas in 2011. UNP fielded its own candidate, AJM Muzammil, who defeated Moragoda and stayed on as Mayor until Rosie Senanayake succeeded him as the next, and now likely the last, UNP Mayor.
So, one can imagine the consternation of Ranil Wickremesinghe in seeing even the last bastion of the UNP’s power legacy being taken away by the upstart NPP. After 1977, through constitutional chicanery and electoral subterfuge the UNP established its supremacy at all levels of government and in all elections. After Chandrika Kumaratunga’s spectacular victories in 1994, the UNP’s electoral superstructure has been steadily dismantled and the only elected body that has survived this debacle is the Colombo Municipality. Until now, that is.
And all of this has been on Ranil Wickremesinghe’s watch. He has been quintessentially a Colombo politician, albeit with an elitist base like JR Jayewardene, unlike the likes of Pieter Keuneman, Bernard Soysa or R. Premadasa who reached out to a broader cross-section of people in the City. Losing Colombo would be the bitterest pill to swallow.
If you are inclined to feel sorry for Mr. Wickremesinghe, save yourself some space to feel good about the future of the City and even the country. Leaving Colombo in the hands of an opportunistically cobbled up SJB-UNP-SLPP alliance would have been both an insult and an injury. The NPP deserved to have one from its ranks as Mayor and it has beaten the UNP in its own game to seal its victory. But having won to govern, will the NPP govern to win – again? That is the question.
by Rajan Philips ✍️
Features
Criminalise war and work tirelessly for peace: Dr. Mahathir Mohamad

Soon to be 100-years ( July 10 th 1925) the two times former Prime Minister of Malaysia’s advice to the world is to “Criminalize War” and work tirelessly for peace.
Q: What is the secret to your healthy happy life?
A: People ask me that question all the time and I say I think its just my good luck. If I have suffered from some kind of fatal disease like cancer, of course life would be different.
I have had heart attacks, and both times I had open heart surgery, but nowadays they don’t open your heart. They use stents. I survived and I recovered and I was able to function. After that I am more careful with what I eat. I keep my weight steady. I do not increase my weight.
In this world, food is the problem. On the one hand you have people who are obese and on the other hand, we have a world that is starving. So, I avoid being obese and eat only very little every day.
Q: What is your advice to the younger generation?
A: My advice is to be active. Active means not only physically active. The brain is an amazing muscle. You need to use it every single day. If you see weight lifters, they have big muscles because they do exercise, You must not become sedentary. Brain must be constantly exercised.
Q: Now that you have retired, what is your day like?
A: I want to take it easy, but most of the time, I come to work almost daily. Usually, people try to retire at 55 or 56. But they must not do that. I keep my body and mind active all the time. I still read, write and do whatever is needed of me.
Q: About the world and with all that is going on around us, what would your advice be to all nations, specially to the nations that are at war?
A: When I stepped down from being Prime Minister, I started a movement to ‘Criminalize War” to make war a crime. There was some support, it took a long time. I believe that any conflict should be resolved. Not through killing each other. You should resolve conflicts through peaceful means like negotiations. That is what we practice here. We are a multinational country, normally there would be many conflicts, but we do not have war in Malaysia. We sit down and talk.
Q: If you had one more opportunity to be Prime Minister of Malaysia, what would you do differently this time?
A: When I stepped down after 22 years, there was still a lot of things to be done. These 22 years were a time of very high tension that came from developed countries. So, at that time, I had to know how things should be done and when things should be done. When I stepped down, unfortunately, my successors were focused on other things. In fact, making money became their priority, so the focus on the country, diminished.
Q: What is the one thing you would like to see happen in your country or in the world as a whole?
A: There are developed countries and there are under developed countries. We want to be a developed country. Developed countries have many assets. For example, economically our people have a fairly good life, our people are involved in activities that contribute to the wellbeing of each other and to other nations. Countries need to help each other, for example in the sciences. There are many areas of research that still need to be done. I would like to see developed countries, reach out to developing countries and form healthy alliances to make each other prosperous.
I have lived a fruitful life. I am happy and I wish to see all nations prosperous and live in peace.
Anusha Rayen, Freenlance Journalist (Formerly ‘The Island Newspaper’ staff member & Parliament reporter) sits for an exclusive interview with former PM of Malaysia Dr. Mahathir Mohamad in Puthrajaya.
Features
Price of Netanyahu’s Iran Offensive

That was brutal, and predicated on years of fabricated deceit. But that is how power operates. Netanyahu is not acting in isolation; he was ushered into this calamity with calculated endorsement from the West. For both Iran and Israel, this is a zero-sum confrontation—a tragic entanglement where ancient antagonisms, contemporary geopolitics, and enduring colonial residues violently intersect. What is most intellectually arresting is the glaring paradox Western powers routinely embrace. When Netanyahu launches a premeditated and unlawful assault on Iran, it is euphemistically labelled as a measure of self-defence. Yet when Vladimir Putin deploys forces into Ukraine, the West decries it as an unprovoked invasion. This hypocrisy in moral reasoning illustrates the incoherence of Western ethical frameworks—marked by selective outrage, selective jurisprudence, and selective memory.
Netanyahu is actively courting American bombardment of Tehran, even venturing so far as to suggest the types of ordnance most suitable for maximum devastation. Trump, meanwhile, hesitates—not over Iran’s fate, but because the ensuing ramifications will inevitably encircle him. This cynical arithmetic typifies the geopolitical stage on which empires perform their cruelties. A week has now passed since Netanyahu’s incursion into Iran—a deliberate campaign tacitly sanctioned by the United States and its constellation of affluent allies, whose modern prosperity is inseparable from centuries of extraction and systemic plunder. War, whether desirable or not, remains the central mechanism by which empires assert dominion, redraw territories, and dismantle resistance. Israel’s open defiance of international law—manifest in its missile barrage on Iranian soil—lays bare an unsettling truth: if global powers truly revered international legal norms, Netanyahu’s actions would face unequivocal denunciation. Instead, one could argue—chillingly—that he affirms history’s most ominous prophecies.
Western media, complicit in sanitising this act of aggression, frames it as an “unprecedented” strike—yet again resorting to euphemism to mask illegality. This was not an improvisational operation; it was the culmination of extensive clandestine preparation by Netanyahu and his ultranationalist Orthodox coalition. Israel’s intelligence apparatus has, over decades, embedded itself within the architecture of Iranian society, executing key figures and orchestrating strategic assassinations. The latest Friday strikes were not merely military engagements—they constituted a coordinated political decapitation, targeting senior officials central to the Iranian state.
Iranian society today endures compounded crises. Their tenacity and national pride remain steadfast, yet they are economically suffocated by Western sanctions, which have induced runaway inflation and scarcity. From first-hand experience in Tehran, Iranians are not consumed by a siege mentality; rather, they display a cautious hospitality that, once trust is earned, transforms into deep generosity—qualities starkly misrepresented in Western discourse. In contrast, Israelis are socialised into a perpetual state of existential fear. “Security” is not merely policy—it is a psychological infrastructure, permeating every aspect of public and private life. Israel’s economy thrives not only through sanctioned trade but through its robust arms industry and cyber-warfare enterprises, often exported under the guise of national expertise. This divergence in societal conditioning is critical: it reflects distinct historical wounds and geopolitical compulsions.
To grasp Israel’s war on Iran, one must situate it within the long arc of Western imperial entrenchment in West Asia. This history is punctuated by covert operations, artificial borders, and a strategy of managed chaos. The 1953 CIA-backed coup in Iran—toppling the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and reinstating the autocratic Shah—is emblematic of this trajectory. For decades, Western powers suppressed indigenous sovereignty while installing compliant strongmen. The 1979 Islamic Revolution was not merely theological upheaval; it was a radical assertion of national agency forged in the crucible of sustained foreign domination. In the revolution’s wake, Iranian society was reconstituted through a deep-rooted collectivism and assertive nationalism that continues to shape its resistance against external coercion.
Viewed through this prism, Netanyahu’s tenure may be remembered as one of the most corrosive in Israel’s history. By fusing religious chauvinism with militaristic expansionism, he has eviscerated Israel’s democratic ethos, transforming “security” into a tool of territorial expropriation and systemic Palestinian disenfranchisement. His escalation against Iran is not merely a tactical error; it is an incitement to regional disintegration. Framed as a crusade for “unconditional surrender,” his belligerence risks igniting a broader conflagration whose consequences will inevitably recoil upon Israel itself. Netanyahu, then, appears less as a strategist than as a provocateur, recklessly agitating the region’s deepest historical and sectarian fissures.
According to Haaretz, an independent Israeli media outlet operating despite a severely censored and often propagandistic Israeli media environment, several prominent progressive Jewish groups were notably absent from the so-called “joint unity statement” backing Israel’s strikes on Iran. These groups contend that while Iran should not acquire nuclear weapons, military action will at best delay the threat and more likely strengthen hardliners. They argue that diplomacy, not bombs, has proven effective in preventing nuclear proliferation—revealing significant divisions within the Jewish community over Netanyahu’s war.
Meanwhile, a report in the Financial Times captures the civil dimension of this confrontation. Despite sustained bombardment, millions of Iranians remain in Tehran. “Trump and Netanyahu say ‘evacuate’ as if they care about our health. How can a city of 10 million evacuate? My husband and I are not going to pave the ground for them. Let them kill us,” Shirin, a private sector employee told the newspaper. Their refusal to flee is not naïveté—it is a visceral affirmation of identity and resistance. The Iranian public consciousness, hardened by decades of war, sanctions, and subterfuge, manifests a collective defiance often misread in the West. The state’s nationalist discourse resonates beyond clerical authority; it channels a cultural memory of resistance against imperial intrusion.
Moreover, the disproportionate risk to civilians is staggering. Israeli operations ostensibly targeting senior military personnel inevitably endanger entire urban populations, as these individuals live and operate within densely populated civilian zones. The echoes of Israel’s operations in Lebanon—where missile strikes against Hezbollah figures claimed high civilian casualties—are unmistakable. The Iranian Health Ministry’s figure of nearly 1,500 casualties reveals the raw human cost beneath the rhetoric of strategic necessity.
This episode also exposes the profound hypocrisy embedded in Western narratives on nuclear proliferation. The International Atomic Energy Agency has repeatedly found no conclusive evidence that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon systematically. Yet, Western powers wield this unverified threat as a pretext for military aggression. The contradictory statements from US officials—from intelligence directors denying Iran’s weaponisation efforts to presidents asserting Tehran is “very close” to the bomb—reflect a politicisation of intelligence designed to justify interventionism.
History has shown the futility of liberal interventionist fantasies: that democracy can be air-dropped or imposed through market restructuring. The Arab Spring, once heralded as a democratic revival, instead expedited the collapse of fragile states and exacerbated regional instability. The supposed liberal order in West Asia has devolved into a transactional, militarised regime wherein peace is manufactured, not cultivated.
Netanyahu’s war on Iran is not an anomaly—it is the terminal result of accumulated imperial failures, ideological rigidity, and historical amnesia. It confirms a grim axiom: when utopias collapse, it is always the powerless who bleed. His offensive, cloaked in the pieties of national security, belongs to a longer, darker chronicle—one whose conclusion will define the fate of West Asia and the very contours of justice in our century.
by Nilantha Ilangamuwa ✍️
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