The February 8th issue of the Newsweek (International) magazine has an absolutely great article titled “End of the Rogue”. The article is about how the concept of a “rogue state” (apparently created the cold war days) is no longer valid and how the US needs to get past it. Not surprisingly many comments on the online edition don’t agree that ...
Nope, not my title :-). Its an editorial by The Washington Times on October 28th. Really worth reading – it talks about how stupid the US is being by challenging Sri Lanka with a war crimes charge about how the LTTE war was won.
This is a great piece on Britain’s Guardian on what has happened in Sri Lanka and what is good for us going forward. In particular, the author touches on the misguided plan by the EU to cut off GSP+ trade concessions for Sri Lanka as a punishment for human rights violations. One of these days I’ll blog about that topic ...
Last week's Sunday Leader newspaper had a reprint of an Indian Defence Review article about the war in Sri Lanka. The eight fundamentals they had identified were:Political WillGo To Hell (to the international community ;-))No NegotiationsRegulate MediaNo Cease-fireComplete Operational FreedomAccent on Young CommandersKeep Your Neighbors In LoopI can't find the article on the Indian Defence Review site (they only publish ...
[There are many scenarios where various corporations rape local consumers in various ways. I'm going to start a series of blogs on such activities with the hope of helping Sri Lankan consumers be more smart and not pay extra for things they don't need to pay (extra) for!]Recently Mobitel, the 2nd largest (I think) mobile operator in Sri Lanka, launch ...
A while ago I blogged how LTTE's global arms procurement person (and their "head of international relations") was still absconding. Well, no more .. KP is now ours :-).He was nabbed in Malaysia by Sri Lankan military intelligence folks and then brought to Colombo .. now being interrogated. He's a PRIZE catch - he set up and lead ...
Today is our "unofficial" official birthday - and today we celebrate 4 years of life!Actually there's no one start date .. there was the day we incorporated the US company, the day the Sri Lankan company was incorporated, the UK company, the day we closed the funding (after changing name to WSO2 from Serendib Systems because James ...
Sri Lanka'a GDP in 2008: Approximately $41B (page 16 of 2008 annual report)Italian Mob annual revenue (2008): Approx. $167B.LTTE's annual profit (according to Jane's Defense) in 2007: $200-300m. I remember reading somewhere that it was $300-400m but can't find the reference. Assuming a profit margin of 20%, that's at least $1.5B annual revenue.Walmart 2008 revenue: $401B.IBM 2008 revenue: $104B.
(I meant to write this on Monday but its been a crazy week!)The Twenty20 Finals on Sunday nite was amazing. Sri Lanka, which had played so well up until the finals, had its luck run out .. and Pakistan, which had a sputtering start, really got into high gear and um, whipped our butt :-). Congratulations Pakistan - after all ...
The 3Ms have been anchoring our bowling attack for a while now: Murali, Malinga and Mendis. But last nite's semi-final against brought out another M-powered bowling weapon: Matthews. Wow, what a game .. of course Dilshan's amazing knock of 96 was the key that gave the bowlers the room they needed to destroy the West Indies. One more bit of ...
Finally, an article that reflects the optimism that at least I personally feel is now common here in Sri Lanka.Here's a small excerpt:June 18 (Bloomberg) -- Sri Lanka’s economy can bounce back from its weakest growth in six years and become the “Hong Kong of India” as the end of almost three decades of civil war boosts business opportunities, HSBC ...
The Lanka Software Foundation started a project at the beginning of this year to develop a P2P application framework (called Dalesa) and then a set of applications on top of that. Wathsala Withanage leads that work and has two other great team members working with him (Nuwan & Nishshanka).Wathsala has recently blogged about the architecture of Dalaesa and the DCache ...
So cool to have those arms here in Sri Lanka. Damn! They didn't invite me to come and shake 'em!!!!!You know Sri Lanka's become main-stream newsworthy when The Onion decides to send Michelle's arms to Sri Lanka! I hope our tourism guys notice this and figure out what to do with the arms!
This is a great article by a US writer (Jim Luce) on the LTTE story. If you read nothing else about Sri Lanka's terrorism story, please read this article - it gives a good dose of reality on what the LTTE became and is.And this bit of text explains quite well why I've been ranting and raving about "the world" ...
