Mitoe Matsumoto was three years and four months old when an atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki at 11.02am on 9 August 1945. Eighty-one years later, the 84-year-old Japanese survivor says the experience
Mahinda’s father, D. A. Rajapaksa, entered politics only after the death of his elder brother, D. M. Rajapaksa. D. M. Rajapaksa was a strong leftist. He entered politics by working to secure
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Tucked into a Sept. 10, 1998, intelligence report sent to President Bill Clinton’s White House was a warning that, more than a quarter-century later, reads with striking prescience. A CIA analyst wrote
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1. Manic “Change Round” In Sigmund Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” the melancholic is in want of an object, never knowing exactly what they may have lost. Melancholy transforms the object-loss of mourning into
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Sky News published a video this month that opens on a rigged explosive device and a pickax under a stark title card, “Inside the Taliban’s Museum of Death.” Three seconds pass before
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Editor’s Note: This essay was originally published in The New Yorker two months after 9/11. The tragedy re-engineered the West while imposing a huge cost on the rest of the world. Twenty-five
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Princess Astrid of Norway has died at the age of 94, the Norwegian royal household announced on Friday, 11 September. “Princess Astrid has died,” the royal household said in a brief statement,
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The Pathfinder Foundation and the Embassy of the United States of America in Sri Lanka have launched a lecture series marking the 250th anniversary of American independence, opening with a discussion on
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The television series Asking the Vast Earth (问苍茫, 2023) opens with a scene of a young Mao Zedong swimming in the Xiang River, swollen from the heavy rains. A fisherman calls from the bank
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Those demanding accountability from Sri Lanka over alleged war crimes are strangely silent about LTTE atrocities. Under Velupillai Prabhakaran, the LTTE killed hundreds of members of rival militant groups, assassinated President Ranasinghe
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Today marks the publication of Francis Fukuyama’s new memoir In the Realm of the Last Man. To purchase a copy, please click here. I composed my essay “The End of History?” sitting in
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Fifty years after Mao Zedong died, China has changed almost beyond recognition, yet one of his most enduring ideas remains firmly embedded in the political machinery of the Communist Party. China is
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Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks shifted American fears towards threats originating overseas, public concern has increasingly turned inward, with Americans now considerably more worried about attacks by domestic extremists than
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by Our Correspondent in Colombo When General Shavendra Silva sat down with Ankit Chauhan, an Indian national and the founder and host of the Impact Stories podcast, the conversation quickly moved beyond
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The UK government has rejected Jamaica’s demand for financial reparations over Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, reaffirming on September 7 that it will not enter negotiations or pay compensation, even
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The year 1874 marks a silent turning point in India’s freedom struggle—not through political uprisings, but through cultural awakening. While historians often trace organised nationalism to the founding of the Congress in
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