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Mahinda Rajapakse's win, with 50.3% of the vote, in Sri Lanka's presidential election last Friday could determine whether the strife-ridden country sinks deeper into conflict. The signs are not good: a four-year cease-fire with the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam is under severe strain, with internal conflict in the rebel-controlled east and political killings blamed on the Tigers in the Sinhalese south. Rajapakse, 60, who says the peace process has been too soft on the Tigers, proposes ripping up the agreement and starting talks from scratch. Sri Lanka's stock market plunged...
Sellathurai Mahalingam knows how brazen Somali pirates have become. Mahalingam is the captain of the MV Semlow, which was attacked in late June as it carried 850 tons of rice from the World Food Program (WFP) that was destined for hungry Somalis. Now back in his home country of Sri Lanka, Mahalingam, 58, related to TIME the saga of his 101-day ordeal as a captive of Somali pirates. It began, he says, with "the flash of 5 to 10 shots. Straightaway I knew it must be pirates." Before he could issue a distress signal, three fiber-glass speedboats with...
...captain was given back a purse containing letters from his wife, and was told he could fly home soon. When he phoned his sister in Sri Lanka, he broke down. "I told her I was safe but did not know when I was coming home," says Mahalingam. He and the chief engineer were taken back to the ship. A few days later, the pirates gathered their weapons, piled into their speedboats, and abandoned both the Semlow and the Ibn Batuta. The WFP denies paying any ransom-"It would set a bad precedent," said a WFP spokesman-but the Motaku Shipping...
...white flag approached. Somali negotiators had sent it to escort the Semlow to a Somali port where it could offload the rice it was still carrying. Mahalingam, who a fortnight ago finally made it back to Mombasa, four months after first setting out, and is now home in Sri Lanka, radioed the Torgelow, a sister ship that was carrying tea and coffee for Somali traders as well as food and oil for the Semlow. But instead of hearing the captain's voice on the radio, Mahalingam heard a familiar Somali accent. The pirates had their next catch...
...their minds. Over a Test career that spanned two decades, Waugh worked at improving his concentration. That may sound dull. He concentrated well? Big deal. But his ability to shut out distractions and silence his demons was the making of him. In the mid-1990s, a bunch of admiring Sri Lankan players gathered around him after a Test. One asked Waugh whether he meditated, for he was trance-like at the crease. "It was," Waugh writes, "one of the finest compliments I could have wished...