[Al Jazeera]

Sri Lanka’s long-running conflict was brutal for its women. More than 80,000 are said to have been widowed in war-affected areas of the island nation.

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[Al Jazeera]

Two years after the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war, many minority Tamils in the north say the military retains too strong a hold over their daily lives.

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[Huffington Post]

The Sri Lankan government is in hot pursuit of U.S. businesses, seeking to usher in more investment dollars to help rebuild the country following the end of the civil war two years ago. Jobs that help to grow the economy and benefit all Sri Lankans are welcome. But companies are on notice that the Sri Lanka government is following ethnically discriminatory policies, and those that favor only certain segments of the population — wittingly or not — are compounding the ethnic divides that caused the 26-year war in the first place.

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[The UN Refugee Agency]

As thousands of students begin uninterrupted schooling after a lapse of years, education officials in Sri Lanka’s former northern conflict zone are facing a shortage of teachers.

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[Al Jazeera]

The Sri Lankan civil war, which began in 1983, saw the Tamil Tigers fighting government forces to create an independent Tamil state named Tamil Eelam in the north and the east of the island. After a 26-year-long military campaign, the Sri Lankan military defeated the Tamil Tigers in May 2009. The civil war caused significant hardships for the population, environment and the economy of the country, with an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people killed during its course. Two years after the war’s end, the Sri Lankan people are still suffering, with trauma, poverty and discrimination remaining part of everyday life.

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[BBC]

Weeping parents have been demonstrating in the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, asking what has become of close family members who have disappeared.

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[ABC News]

Australian politicians are calling for an international investigation of apparent war crimes in Sri Lanka. A documentary aired on ABC1’s Four Corners on Monday night showed allegations of rape, torture and murder of civilians during Sri Lanka’s civil war.

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[Human Rights Watch]

In a report released last month Human Rights Watch called on the US government to launch criminal investigations into allegations of detainee abuse authorized by senior Bush administration officials. The 107-page report, “Getting Away with Torture: The Bush Administration and Mistreatment of Detainees,” presents substantial information warranting criminal investigations of former President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and CIA Director George Tenet, for ordering practices such as “waterboarding,” the use of secret CIA prisons, and the transfer of detainees to countries where they were tortured. Such acts violated the Convention against Torture, the Geneva Conventions, and other international treaties binding on the United States.

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[Reuters]

Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa landed in China Tuesday in search of support against an aggressive Western push for a probe into war crimes allegations and tighter economic ties in a stormy financial world.

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[Human Rights Watch]

The Sri Lankan government’s failure to bring to justice those responsible for the execution-style slaying of 17 aid workers five years ago highlights a broader lack of will to prosecute soldiers and police for rights abuses, Human Rights Watch said today. Despite strong evidence of involvement by the security forces in the killings, government inquiries have languished and no one has been arrested for the crime.

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