Word: lanka
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...last editorial that he wrote, Lasantha Wickrematunge lamented the loss of Sri Lanka's independent voices. "Much of the media has been bought, or cajoled and bullied into silence. Dozens of journalists are dead and others have been incarcerated without trial for months," he wrote in the Jan. 4 issue of his paper, the Sunday Leader. "Who then survives to provide the public with a contrarian view...
...work when two men on motorcycles swerved in front of his car to block its path. Two others pulled up on either side, smashed the car's windows and shot him. Wickrematunge died of his injuries a few hours later. The four masked gunmen disappeared. (See pictures of Sri Lanka...
...Lanka's civil war (not to mention the 2004 tsunami) has never stopped surfers from making the pilgrimage to its southern and eastern beaches. The great whites that cruise the waters off Cape Town don't discourage boardriders from attempting the Dungeons - home to some of the world's biggest ridable waves. In season, Hawaii attracts hurricane heads. But you'd think even the wildest wave rider might pause at the prospect of surfing Liberia...
...death has galvanized the growing anger among the press and other civil-society groups in Sri Lanka about restrictions on free expression in the country and intimidation of the media. Just two days earlier, the offices of Sri Lanka's largest private broadcasting company were attacked in the middle of the night. "What has happened to Lasantha Wickrematunge today is an absolute atrocity," said Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, executive director of the Centre for Policy Alternatives, a research group based in Colombo. He said the two attacks were linked, part of a plan to silence Sri Lanka's few independent media voices...
...intended at first to get the newspaper off the ground and then return to law, but he couldn't get enough of the thrill of journalism. So it was especially frustrating for him to be prevented from running pictures or firsthand reporting from the war zones in northern Sri Lanka. The government claims that the 25-year-old war is finally approaching an end - an event any journalist would be eager to cover - but it has refused to allow reporters or photographers regular access to the war zones or to those areas where an estimated 230,000 people have been...