News stories by Amantha Perera, page 10

COLOMBO, Feb 14 (IPS) - The year was 1998 and porters at the wholesale vegetable market in the Sri Lankan capital Colombo had gone on strike, virtually suspending vegetable distribution in the city and its suburbs.

UDAWALAWE, Sri Lanka, Dic 30 (IPS) - Wild elephants are usually the primary attraction in the remote shrub jungles of Udawalawe, about 180 kilometres southeast of Sri Lanka's capital Colombo. But this Christmas season, the massive Udawalawe dam stole the limelight from the lumbering beasts.

MULLAITIVU, Sri Lanka, Dic 23 (IPS) - The landscape in northern Sri Lanka's former war zone can change abruptly from the ordinary to the surreal.

DHARAN, Nepal/KILINOCHCHI, Sri Lanka, Dic 13 (IPS) - Sita Tamang's husband went missing sometime in 2004, two years before Nepal's civil war came to an end. A native of Dharan, a town about 600 kilometres southeast of Kathmandu, Tamang waited seven years after his disappearance before she tried to claim compensation offered by the government after the 2006 peace deal ended this country's bloodshed.

COLOMBO, Dic 01 (IPS) - Somali pirates on the southwest Indian Ocean have become one of the biggest security risks for commercial maritime shipping over the last several years. But even as piracy gave rise to international furore, an unlikely benefactor emerged: bluefin tuna stocks in the Indian Ocean.

MULLAITIVU, Sri Lanka, Nov 24 (IPS) - The tour guide's voice echoes around the dark, musty room, three stories underground. Fifty visitors – among them mothers holding infants, youths snapping pictures on mobile phones and grandparents leaning against the walls – are crammed into the narrow stairwell that leads down into the chamber, listening attentively to his every word.

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka, Nov 10 (IPS) - War is seldom good for anything, especially protracted conflicts like the one in Sri Lanka, which dragged on for over three decades and claimed between 80,000 to 100,000 lives.

PANSALGOLLA, Sri Lanka, Oct 28 (IPS) - The old adage ‘nature is the great equaliser’ no longer holds true in countries like Sri Lanka, where the poor bear the brunt of extreme weather events.

VAVUNIYA, Sri Lanka, Oct 18 (IPS) - Mamaduwa, a remote village in Sri Lanka’s northern Vavuniya district where scorching winds blow across parched earth, is trying to forget the past.

COLOMBO, Oct 05 (IPS) - In 2011, 1,463 cases of sexual exploitation of children were reported to the Sri Lankan Police, who found every single complaint to be genuine and opened investigations.