News stories by IPS Correspondents, page 15

The High-level United Nations Conference on South-South Cooperation kicked-off here Tuesday, with U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Asha Rose Migiro calling for practical solutions and reinforced South-South and North-South partnerships to address the demands of our 'deeply interconnected world.'

Vakarai is a dust bowl of a village, right at the edge of the coast in Sri Lanka’s east. The last three decades have not been too good for this fishing village -- located about 300 kilometres east of the capital Colombo -- and its inhabitants, mostly from the minority Tamil community.

The jungle church was once again filled with devotees camping out for days to take part in the feast of the Virgin Mary of Madhu. It had been over 27 years since the last occasion when tens of thousands of believers streamed into the church located at Madhu, in the north-western Mannar District, about 300 km from the capital Colombo.

Elections in early August for local administrative bodies in Jaffna and Vavuniya, two Tamil-dominated northern towns, would be the first litmus test for the Sri Lankan government to restore normalcy in a region devastated by nearly three decades of war.

Nearly three decades of war ended in Sri Lanka last week and a victorious President Mahinda Rajapaksa has extended a fresh hand of friendship to the minority Tamils, but most members of this community feel it will take a long time for the wounds to heal after years of mistrust and alienation.

The theme of the third biennial Knowledge Management Africa (KMA) conference, which opened Monday in the capital of Senegal, is lofty - 'knowledge to reposition Africa in the world economy'. But the aim is more down-to-earth: to find ways to apply vital information to the basic question of improving the lives of Africa's people.

At the end of the long editorial room of ‘The Sunday Leader’ hangs a large sketch of Lasantha Wickrematunge, the late editor of the newspaper, who was assassinated on Jan. 7. He was shot in his car, just five minutes from his office.

As the latest round of Asia’s longest-running guerrilla war winds down, scores of journalists here are experiencing intimidation and harassment for being critical of the military campaign against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

The escalation since December of the conflict in Sri Lanka’s north between government forces and the Tamil Tigers is taking a heavy toll on children and civilians, many of whom are still trying to escape the combat zones.

As Sri Lanka celebrate 61 years of independence from British colonial rule on Wednesday, the enthusiasm is understandably not shared by minority Tamils living under the military jackboot in the north of the country.