Colombo (LNW): Education Minister Susil Premjayanth speaking in Parliament today (05) emphasised that it is not possible to postpone the G.C.E. Advanced Level Examination this year, pointing out that a postponement would result in affecting the G.C.E. Ordinary Level Examinations and the completion of the syllabus for the 2024 school year.
The 2023 AL Exam, therefore, will be held from November to December as scheduled, the Minister asserted.
Colombo (LNW): The Cabinet of Ministers has shed its green light for the gazetting of the newly drafted bill for the proposed Anti-Terrorist Act (ATA), a replacement to the existing Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), with intentions to table it in Parliament for approval.
The Act, according to the government, was spearheaded by the Legal Draftsman and was initially published in the Government Gazette in March 2023, only to meet a severe backlash from a number of parties, including the civil society, political parties of the Opposition and human rights groups concerning what they described as questionable provisions in the draft bill.
The Justice Minster thereafter had sought feedback and suggestions from stakeholders to the dialogue and even personally got involved in some of the focus group discussions.
Following revision, a collective feedback was received to the proposed ATA bill and the Legal Draftsman undertook the task of amending the original version that had earlier seen the light in the Government Gazette.
The clearance of the Attorney General has also been granted for the new draft bill upon review, and subsequently, with the nod from the Cabinet, the ATA bill is set to be gazetted, later to be tabled in Parliament.
Colombo (LNW): The Sri Lankan Rupee (LKR) has slightly depreciated against the US Dollar today (05) in comparison to yesterday as revealed by the official exchange rates list issued by the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL).
Accordingly, the buying price of the US Dollar has increased to Rs. 314.87, and the selling price to Rs. 326.65 from Rs. 326.28.
The Sri Lankan Rupee also indicates slight fluctuation against several other foreign currencies, but it indicates a depreciation against Gulf currencies.
Colombo (LNW): The new Anti-Corruption Act recently passed in Parliament will come into force from September 15, 2023 and assets that have been illegally stationed overseas will be recovered via the new law, emphasised Justice Minister Wijeyadasa Rajapaksa.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) will also convey their support in this regard, the Minister told media.
Meanwhile, a special meeting was held between the Justice Minister and South Asian Regional Envoy to the UNODC Marco Teixeira yesterday (04).
Guangxi Vocational & Technical College, formerly (GVTC) known as Guangxi Labor University, was founded in 1965. It has successively gone through historical stages such as Guangxi Agricultural College Tropical Crop Branch (undergraduate), Guangxi Agricultural Reclamation Workers’ University, and Guangxi Vocational University of Agriculture, Industry and Commerce.
In 1998, with the approval of the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, GVTC became one of the first batch of independent and restructured public higher vocational colleges in Guangxi. The College is located in Nanning Airport Economic Zone, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China, with beautiful campus scenery and a strong cultural atmosphere. The College has been selected as a high-level professional group construction unit in the “High-Level Vocational Schools and Professional Construction Plan with Chinese Characteristics”.
The College adheres to the education direction of featuring agriculture and coordinated development of primary, secondary, and tertiary industries, and takes the initiative to adjust and optimize the professional structure by docking with regional economic pillar industries and strategic emerging industries.
GVTC has ten teaching faculties, including the School of Agriculture Engineering, the School of Health & Care, the School of Intelligent Manufacturing, the School of Big Data, the School of Art and Design, the School of Communication, the School of Logistics, the School of Business, the School of Marxism, the School of Liberal Education, with a total of 47 enrollment majors.
There are more than 21,000 students, including more than 130 international students from 9 countries including Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia.
The Major Group of Tea Tree Cultivation and Tea Leaf Processing in the College is the development focus of GVTC’s Double-High (High-Level Vocational School and High-Level Professional Groups) plan. In the process of developing the professional group, “Silk Road Tea Institute” has made significant progress as a brand for international exchanges in the College and has been widely recognized by international partners.
Taking tea as a medium and making friends with tea, the “Silk Road Tea Institute” has built a bridge for communication and exchange between China’s vocational education and “Belt and Road” countries. The project has been built into an international vocational education brand covering all aspects from secondary vocational education to higher vocational education, technical skills training to academic education.
Through unremitting efforts during recent years, the “Silk Road Tea Institute” has made great achievements in the construction of international tea industry cooperation base, the international exchange of tea culture, the construction of tea industry curriculum resources, and the humanistic and technical services for the tea industry and other aspects.
Up to now, GVTC has cooperated with the Indonesia Research Institute for Tea and Cinchona(RITC), Mae Fah Luang University(MFU), Uva Wellassa University(UWU), and Northern Mountainous Agriculture and Forestry Science Institute(NOMAFSI), jointly build the “Silk Road Tea Institute”.
It has carried out extensive cooperation in many research fields such as tea production process and equipment upgrading, tea tasting, tea picking technology, tea plant research in high-altitude areas, and soil protection for tea planting, etc.
The College has formed a complete set of international curriculum resources for the tea industry, including “Bilingual video MOOCs”, “English version of the course PPTs”, “English syllabus”, and some “After-class Exercises”, following the requirements of high-standard international course resource construction.
At present, 10 international curriculum resources have been completed, including Nixing Pottery, Chinese Dark Tea: Liupao Tea, Chinese Incense, Modern Tea Cuisine, Chinese Tea Art, Chinese Scented Tea: Jasmine, and Chinese Tea Utensils: Appreciation of Tea Sets. The “International Training Standards for Tea Learning (Elementary)” carried by these courses has been certified by SEAMEO TED (Southeast Asian Education Ministers’ Organization Regional Center for Technical Education Development) and CATECP (China-ASEAN Technical Education Cooperation Platform), and the relevant 10 curriculum experts have also been included in the ASEAN Expert Database.
Combined with the joint scientific research and technical training research of the “Silk Road Tea Institute” in various countries, new curriculum resources such as “Tea Production Technology”, and “Pest and Disease Control of Tea Plants” are under development.
Through the “Silk Road Tea Institute”, the school has conducted a total of 9 in-depth seminars with experts from Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and Maldives, involving more than 70 experts and professors at home and abroad. and carried out in-depth research in tea production process equipment upgrading, derived milk tea products, joint development of tea, tea tasting, and other fields.
Overseas experts, including Thailand, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Japan, Italy, Turkey, Vietnam, and Myanmar, gave 11 lectures related to the tea industry to domestic colleges, with nearly 3,000 teachers and students directly participating in China. The school has also held 11 training sessions about tea, focusing on such excellent courses as “Chinese Tea and Organic Tea Production and Processing”, “Tea Sensory Evaluation Technology”, ” Current Situation and Countermeasures of Tea Garden Tourism in China”, ” The Construction and Management of Eco-Tea Garden”, attracting 2,300 students from Southeast Asia, South Asia, Japan, South Korea, and Eastern Europe to participate directly.
Three customized tea-tasting training sessions were held. For Thailand, the training was focusing on Chinese-Thai tea tasting, Beverage Preparation, Tea Grading Standards, and Tea Processing Methods. The training audience involved more than 300 people from 14 schools and enterprises in Thailand, and more than 20 kinds of tea were tasted in this training.
For Indonesia, the serial training was mainly around the development of Chinese tea culture, tea art performances, and some other content, with a total of more than 200 person times of tea lovers from multiple colleges, enterprises, and research centers learning experience.
As for Sri Lanka, GVTC jointly launched a series of training on tea processing skills with Uva Wellassa University in Sri Lanka, opened an offline training venue at UWU, and carried out a fixed teaching activity with a planning cycle of one month for UWU teachers and students and local tea enterprise personnel.
Based on the cooperation between the “Silk Road Tea Institute” and various countries in different directions, in 2022, more than 90 students from Indonesia, Laos, East Timor, the Philippines, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and other South and Southeast Asian countries have willing to apply to study in China, focusing on the direction of “tea e-commerce” and “tea production and processing technology”. Through multiple interviews, the first group of 35 academic students was admitted to the Tea major.
At the end of April 2023, on behalf of Guangxi Vocational and Technical College, the ” Silk Road Tea Institute ” assisted The Scientific Unit of Technical and Vocational Education of Greek in organizing international internship and employment recruitment activities opened to China and ASEAN, and shared the school’s professional advantages during the event, which enhanced the overseas recognition of GVTC.
At the same time, the “Silk Road Tea Institute” is also incubating enterprise business cooperation group projects, planning to drive secondary vocational education institutions and enterprises to go overseas through domestic brand influence, and promote overseas industrial cooperation.
In September of 2023, GVTC will seek for cooperation globally at the 2023 China-ASEAN Tea Industry Vocational Education Cooperation Forum, transforming the “Silk Road Tea Institute” into a new platform for international tea industry exchange and innovation cooperation.
Colombo (LNW): A 19-year old youth who had allegedly posted a ‘threatening content’ on Facebook against President Ranil Wickremesinghe has been arrested by the Criminal Investigation Department (CID).
The suspect’s Facebook post in question allegedly requests the public to provide him a sniper ahead of the Sri Lankan President’s scheduled visit to Eppawala on September 07.
Court investigations are currently underway to ascertain whether there is any connection between the post and the incident where an Army solider residing in Eppawala fled with a T-56 weapon from the Kilinochchi Army Camp.
The 19-year old suspect, a resident of Mediyawa in Eppawala who serves as a mobile bakery goods seller, has been remanded till September 08, as per the order of the Colombo Chief Magistrate Court.
By: Staff Writer
Colombo (LNW): One of the world’s largest shipping companies ‘Far Shipping’ has agreed to provide employment opportunities for Sri Lankan trained seafarers, Ports, Shipping and Aviation Minister Nimal Siripala de Silva said.
He said this yesterday when a delegation from ‘Far Shipping’, including its Managing Director Yu Yong Jun, met the Minister at his office.
U Yong Jun said many Sri Lankan trained young sailors can be given job opportunities in his company located in China.
Therefore, he said there will be long discussions with the stakeholders involved in the naval sector of Sri Lanka regarding the recruitment methods.
Jun further said his company is willing to hire young people who have graduated from naval training institutes in Sri Lanka for on-the-job training and then hire them for permanent service.
Minister Silva said the Mahapola Maritime Company under the Sri Lanka Ports Authority as well as private sector institutions and the University of Moratuwa train quality teams in the maritime fields every year and if necessary they can be given a course that includes proficiency in the Chinese language.
Recalling that China has helped Sri Lanka as a friend since the past, the Minister expressed his gratitude as the Minister in charge of the Government of Sri Lanka for providing employment opportunities to the youth.
Sri Lanka tops the list of nations that may host a Chinese naval base in the coming years as Beijing seeks to expand its maritime capabilities, according to a new report. The South Asian nation’s Hambantota.
The South Asian nation’s Hambantota port is the most likely spot for a base given the US$2.19 billion China has already invested there, according to an assessment by the AidData research project.
The Hambantota commercial port in Sri Lanka has long been considered a prime candidate for a Chinese naval base.
Beijing gained control of the port in 2017, when a Chinese state-run company signed a 99-year lease with Colombo to run the facility – after Sri Lanka was unable to pay back the Chinese loans that built it.
“Naval cooperation was further cemented in 2018, when China gave a Type 053 frigate to the Sri Lankan Navy as a gift, rather than a foreign military sale,” AidData said.
Colombo’s port is consistently the highest-ranked South Asian port in Lloyd’s List of 100 container ports, even after the country’s 2022 crisis.
Regarding military access, Sri Lanka played a critical role in the tectonic shifts regarding Indian Ocean basing in the early decades of the Cold War.
After non-aligned politicians in Sri Lanka (formerly known as Ceylon) won elections in 1956, the new leadership called for the United Kingdom to vacate its naval and air bases in the country.
Colombo’s policy shift revealed how a smaller state’s political decisions can affect the calculus of large powers’ strategic ambitions.
By: Staff Writer
Colombo (LNW): Amidst Sri Lanka’s worst economic crisis since independence, the UN revised its joint Humanitarian Needs and Priorities (HNP) Plan, while extending more aid for development programmes.
The United Nations was expecting to provide more than 300 million dollars through the new co-operation framework for the development Programmes of next 5 years.
The new cooperation frame work includes the adoption of the Anti-Corruption Act and the establishment of the Parliamentary Budget Office, United Nations Resident Coordinator in Sri Lanka Marc-André Franche said.
He gave this assurance during a meeting with Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardana recently, the Communication Department of Parliament said.
The envoy congratulated Sri Lanka on the adoption of the Anti-Corruption Act and the establishment of the Parliamentary Budget Office.
The Speaker expressed his gratitude for the continuous support of the United Nations Development Programme as a development partner of the Parliament of Sri Lanka.
Furthermore, views were also exchanged on Sri Lanka’s legislative process, electoral system, peace-building activities and women’s representation in politics.
Since June 2022, the UN team in Sri Lanka and NGOs have used the HNP to respond to the Government’s request for more support to alleviate the impact of the country’s debt and food crisis, and shortages of medicines.
Aligned with appeals from other UN agencies, the HNP has raised $79 million for Sri Lanka through various countries and organizations (click here for the full list).
The HNP revision, which extends the plan through 2022, requires $70 million in additional funds to reach a total of $149.7 million.
Meanwhile the SL Cabinet has given the green light for the country’s Green Bond Framework, which was developed by the Ministry of Finance, with support from the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP).
Sri Lanka’s Green Bond Framework has been designed to support the country in the short term and long term, by providing a framework that can be utilized for debt restructuring and for the long term to raise green finance, once debt sustainability has been reached.
The development of the Framework underwent consultation and received inputs from a number of Ministries and Regulators including but not limited to the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, Ministry of Environment, the Sustainable Development Council, as well as development partners such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI).
The Government of Sri Lanka has set an ambitious agenda to develop the country’s sustainable finance market, by focusing on the development of tools and policy guidance that is needed to effectively manage environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks and meet the country’s climate objectives.
By: Staff Writer
Colombo (LNW): In a proactive move to bolster the tourism sector and attract a new wave of remote workers, the Cabinet of Ministers has given its seal of approval to a range of visa programs, including a novel offering known as the “Digital Nomad Visa” (DNV).
Under the Digital Nomad Visa program, applicants are required to demonstrate a minimum monthly income of $ 2,000, which must be channelled through the Sri Lankan banking system. This visa is renewable annually, subject to certification of the requisite funds.
The application fee for the DNV is set at $ 500, and it encompasses the visa holder’s spouse and dependents.
This initiative comes in response to a noticeable shift in people’s attitudes towards online business and the newfound ability to work remotely, anywhere with an internet connection.
Several factors have driven this change, including technological advancements, the flexibility of work-life balance, global connectivity, and evolving work cultures.
The breakthrough move was proposed by and secured Cabinet approval by Minister of Public Security Tiran Alles.
Sources said notably, many countries in the region and beyond have introduced DNV to attract a distinct type of tourism.
For instance, Germany offers a freelance visa tailored for self-employed individuals. Malaysia has its “DE Rantau Nomad Pass,” which also mandates a monthly income of $ 2,000.
New Zealand refers to its visa as a “Working Holiday Visa,” requiring proof of $ 2,700 in funds.
Sri Lanka is planning to simplify the country’s visa issuance methodology to make it easier for tourists and businesses to visit the country.
The Cabinet of Ministers this week approved a proposal furnished by the Minister of Public Security Tiran Alles to further simplify visa methodologies implemented at present.
According to the Immigration and Emigration Act No. 20 of 1948 and the regulations issued under that, the Department of Immigration and Emigration issues three categories of visa, namely visit visa, resident visa and transit visa.
The Cabinet Office noted that considering the complexity in the visa issued under visit visa and resident visa categories, measures have been taken to review Sri Lanka’s visa methodology with visa methodologies of countries that attract more tourists.
The current visa system in Sri Lanka is complex and outdated. It has been criticised by businesses and tourists alike, who say that it is too difficult to navigate and that it takes too long to get a visa.
Norway’s Digital Nomad Visa spans two years and necessitates a monthly income of $ 3,140. Portugal’s version is initially valid for one year and can be extended up to four years, with a monthly income requirement of $ 2,950. Spain’s Digital Nomad Visa calls for a monthly income of $ 2,215.
By: Staff Writer
Colombo (LNW): The Lanka Mineral Sands Company has taken steps to introduce a new methodology for the sale of Sri Lanka’s minerals as the foreign exchange earnings remain low due to the export of high value minerals such as ilmenite, rutile and zircon as raw materials to foreign countries.
The officials said that measures have been taken to sell the minerals at the highest prices ever in the history and accordingly a ton of rutile will be sold for US $ 1733, a ton of ilmenite for $ 251 and a ton of Hi-Titanium ilmenite for $ 250.
Agreements have been signed to give more than 7% for each ton as the state share.Due to this, the new system has been set up in such a way that the government can earn a large amount of revenue, the officials said.
Lanka Mineral Sands (LMS) will ship it’s largest-ever consignment of mineral sands by value this week, signaling the advent of a new chapter of operations.
The cargo of concentrate ‘tailings’ is valued at several million dollars, and is being shipped to its Chinese buyer following an international tender process with the participation of five bidders at a pre-determined benchmark price.
This shipment represents the largest-ever for LMS since its inception in 1957.
Puttalam Ilmenite Limited (PIL), the country’s premier explorer of mineral sands, represented the buyer in Sri Lanka.
Puttalam Ilmenite together with its partners have invested over US$ 20 million in Sri Lanka for research and development in the country’s mining sector, and is looking to grow the commercial potential of the segment internationally.
The company is planning to build the country’s first world-class mineral processing facility that will represent the largest-ever foreign direct investment in the sector through the BOI.
Lanka Mineral Sands is a 100 percent state-owned enterprise, and is one of Sri Lanka’s few profitable state entities.
Its operations are based at Pulmoddai on the East Coast, employing over 600 people including engineers. LMS is in the process of expanding its operations at Kokkilai.
Chairman of Lanka Mineral Sands, Dr. Udeni Dassanayake said, “This has been a progressive year for LMS, and we have already transferred over Rs.1.7 billion to the Treasury in addition to securing a new buyer and obtaining market-based price for our product.
General Manager of PIL, Ryan Rockwood, a seasoned mining professional said, “Sri Lanka’s mineral sands sector offers great potential, and we possess a good understanding of its composition and value for buyers all across the world.”
“Ilmenite has taken the lead in mineral sands exploration in Sri Lanka in tandem with our international partners, who have placed a great deal of trust in our company and are continuing to invest in Sri Lanka.