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1 month ago | 
countercurrents.org | Shiran Illanperuma |Darini Rajaisngham-Senanayake |Binoy Kampmark |Vijay Prashad
The maiden budget by Sri Lanka’s new government reflects the limitations of austerity and the need to reinstill confidence in ideas of investment-led growth and industrialisation. On 17 February 2025, Sri Lanka’s Anura Kumara Dissanayake delivered his maiden budget speech. Dissanayake, who is both president and finance minister, stated that the budget was based on principles of productive growth, active public engagement, and equitable distribution.
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2 months ago | 
countercurrents.org | Bharat Dogra |Darini Rajaisngham-Senanayake |Cedric Prakash |Sanjay N. Parate
Moving away from the controversies and contradictions of daily discourse, can we consider what the most sincere and genuine reform in USA, capable of giving real relief to the people of the USA as well as to the rest of the world, will involve?
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2 months ago | 
countercurrents.org | Darini Rajaisngham-Senanayake |Shiran Illanperuma |Binoy Kampmark |Vijay Prashad
Independence has been a long mirage in geostrategic Ceylon/ Sri Lanka where history seems to repeat itself as tragedy and farce in equal measure. This week, the geostrategic Indian Ocean island is set to mark 77 years of faux Independence from the British Raj. There will be much pomp and pageantry to mask the fact that the country is caught in a neocolonial Eurobond US dollar debt trap and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), bailout business at this time.
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Nov 28, 2024 | 
countercurrents.org | Chandra Muzaffar |Junaid Ahmad |Darini Rajaisngham-Senanayake |Bharat Dogra
The International Movement for a Just World (JUST) expresses total solidarity with detained former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan who has been imprisoned since August 2023 by a military regime with a civilian facade in Islamabad. JUST endorses the demands made by the Movement for Justice that has grown around Imran. It is one of the most popular grassroots movements that has emerged in Pakistan’s history.
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Nov 28, 2024 | 
countercurrents.org | Darini Rajaisngham-Senanayake |Shiran Illanperuma |Binoy Kampmark |Vijay Prashad
At Annual Meetings in Washington last month International Monetary Fund head, Kristalina Georgieva claimed Sri Lanka as a debt restructuring ‘success’ story.[i] Left unsaid by the IMF’s Managing Director was that Sri Lanka’s debt had apparently ballooned from $26 billion to a purported whopping $100 billion during two years of “reforms’ under the IMF’s Extended Fund Facility (EFF)![ii] A month later the island’s newly elected Cabinet led by President Anura Kumara Dissanayaka signed off on an...
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Nov 16, 2024 | 
countercurrents.org | Shiran Illanperuma |Binoy Kampmark |Vijay Prashad |Darini Rajaisngham-Senanayake
Data from the Election Commission of Sri Lanka showed that the National People’s Power (NPP) coalition scored a decisive victory in Sri Lanka’s first general election since defaulting on its external debt. With 61.56 percent of the popular vote, the NPP won 159 seats in Parliament. This gave President Anura Kumara Dissanayake (AKD) a supermajority in parliament and the power to make constitutional amendments.
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Sep 30, 2024 | 
countercurrents.org | Binoy Kampmark |Vijay Prashad |Darini Rajaisngham-Senanayake |Ana Pararajasingham
Anura Kumara Dissanayake, known with convenient laziness as AKD, became Sri Lanka’s latest president after a runoff count focusing on preferential votes. The very fact that it went to a second count with a voter turnout of 77% after a failure of any candidate to secure a majority was itself historic, the first since Sri Lankan independence in 1948. AKD’s presidential victory tickles and excites the election watchers for various reasons.
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Sep 25, 2024 | 
countercurrents.org | Vijay Prashad |Atul Chandra |Darini Rajaisngham-Senanayake |Ana Pararajasingham
by Atul Chandra and Vijay PrashadOn September 22, 2024, the Sri Lankan election authority announced that Anura Kumara Dissanayake of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)-led National People’s Power (NPP) alliance won the presidential election.
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Sep 21, 2024 | 
countercurrents.org | Bharat Dogra |Devika Mittal |Darini Rajaisngham-Senanayake |M Adil Khan
In recent days the Ukraine-Russia war has been changing in such ways that it starts looking more and more like a direct confrontation between Russia and the USA/NATO. This is because more and more destructive weapons have been supplied from the USA and other NATO member countries to Ukraine and in many cases such supplies also involve providing the technical expertise for using these weapons effectively. This is in addition to the supply of intelligence, satellite and other surveillance data.
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Sep 21, 2024 | 
countercurrents.org | Vidya Bhushan Rawat |Dinkar Kapoor |Manas Jena |Darini Rajaisngham-Senanayake
To Smt Droupadi Murmu President of India Rashtrapati Bhawan Respected Rashtrapati Ji, On the 27th of September, 2021, I made an appeal to your predecessor that there was urgent need to mandate reservations for the SCs/STs/OBCs and women at the higher levels of judiciary to ensure that the judiciary at all levels would be in a position to deliver justice in a manner that reflects the point of view of such disadvantaged sections of the society...
