<ul><li>SLMC submits draft for Health Ministry review&nbsp;</li><li>Century-old provisions don’t address present-day requirements&nbsp;</li></ul> The Sri Lanka Medical Council (SLMC) has submitted a draft to amend the country’s long-standing medical law – the Medical Ordinance, No. 26 of 1927 - with the proposed changes expected to grant the Council powers to carry out inspections and strengthen its regulatory role, according to SLMC Registrar Dr Hemantha Herath.Speaking to The Daily Morning, he said that most of the existing legal provisions date back more than a century and no longer address present-day requirements in the health sector. “We are dealing with legal provisions that were enacted more than 100 years ago. Now, we have drafted new provisions and submitted them to the Health Ministry. The Ministry is reviewing them at the moment,” he said.One of the key features of the proposed amendments, he said, is the inclusion of provisions enabling the SLMC to carry out inspections, powers that are not available under the current law. “There are plans to include provisions that would enable the SLMC to conduct random inspections. Under the current laws, there are no provisions for that. Through these amendments, we will be able to address many of the issues that we face,” he added.He also explained the conduct of medical professionals is currently monitored under a separate Gazette notification which outlines the procedures for disciplinary action. “There is a separate Gazette which sets out the provisions for the SLMC to monitor the conduct of professionals. That Gazette explains how complaints against medical professionals should be lodged, how inquiries should be conducted, and what actions should be taken. We act according to those provisions.”The SLMC is a statutory body established to protect healthcare seekers by maintaining academic and professional standards, discipline, and ethical practices among health professionals, including medical officers registered with the Council.The proposed amendments come after the Cabinet of Ministers, in 2023, approved amendments to the Medical Ordinance (Chapter 105) aimed at modernising regulations, strengthening the SLMC and the Ceylon Medical College Council, and introducing national policies for the recognition of foreign medical degrees.

 Medical ordinance to be amended 

The Electricity Consumers’ Association (ECA) claimed that despite the establishment of six new companies following the dissolution of the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB), there has been no improvement in efficiency or relief for electricity consumers. Commenting on the recent restructuring process, ECA General Secretary Sanjeewa Dhammika claimed the change had only affected the name and structure of the institution, with no visible benefits to the public. “The name of the CEB has changed, efficiency has not improved at all. If efficiency had actually improved, electricity tariffs would not continue to increase,” he said. He also warned that a possible increase in fuel prices in the coming days could place additional pressure on electricity tariffs. “Fuel prices may increase again in the near future. What is the solution then? Even now, electricity tariffs are being increased from time to time. The same thing happened before as well. So, what exactly is the difference? We don’t see any change.” The comments come as the six new companies established through the dissolution of the CEB officially came into operation on 9 March. Under the restructuring process, the CEB Act, No. 17 of 1969 was repealed and the CEB ceased to exist as a corporate entity. The six newly established Companies are Lanka Electricity Generation Lanka (Private) Limited, the National Transmission Network Service Provider (Pvt) Ltd, the National System Operator (Pvt) Ltd, Electricity Distribution Lanka (Pvt) Ltd, the Employees Fund (Pvt) Ltd and Energy Ventures Lanka (Pvt) Ltd. Multiple attempts to contact Energy Minister Anura Karunathilaka proved futile.&nbsp;

CEB dissolution: Consumers query lack of relief 

The Colombo High Court yesterday (14) rejected a preliminary objection raised by the defence in a case filed against the son of former President and attorney Mahinda Rajapaksa, Yoshitha Rajapaksa, under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, thereby allowing the trial to proceed. The ruling was delivered by Judge Udesh Ranatunga.&nbsp;Delivering the order, the Judge stated that the preliminary objection raised by the defence, claiming that the conspiracy charge against the defendant could not be maintained, is without basis. Accordingly, the Court rejected the objection and held that there is no impediment to proceeding with the relevant charge against the defendant.&nbsp;Following the ruling, the indictment was read out to the defendant Yoshitha Rajapaksa in open Court. Appearing from the dock, the defendant pleaded not guilty to the charges levelled against him. Following the plea, the trial officially commenced before the Court.

Money laundering case: Yoshitha’s objection on conspiracy charge rejected 

While global tech giants spend billions training artificial intelligence (AI) that still struggles in Sinhala, a Sri Lankan research team has built a model that does it properly — using just two Graphics Processing Units (GPUs).In a blind evaluation, the new Sinhala language model scored 4.5 out of five, compared with just one out of five for the base Meta Llama 3.1 model on the same Sinhala prompts. The team also cut the model's perplexity — a standard measure of how well an AI understands a language — by close to 90 per cent. The model can hold a natural conversation in Sinhala, answer questions, follow instructions, and stay coherent across long responses.The research has been accepted for publication in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Access, a peer-reviewed open-access journal of the IEEE.&nbsp;Sinhala is spoken by more than 20 million people, it is barely represented in the training data of the AI systems everyone is talking about. Ask ChatGenerative Pre-trained Transformer, Claude, or Gemini something in Sinhala and the answers sometimes tend to be broken, repetitive, or nonsense.The deeper issue is sovereignty. Even when foreign AI tools do work in Sinhala, Sri Lanka has no control over them — the model weights, the training data, the safety rules, and ultimately the off-switch all sit with companies in the United States (US) or China. For a country where most Government, healthcare, and education conversations happen in Sinhala, depending entirely on AI built and operated abroad is a structural risk over data privacy, national security, cultural framing, and the basic continuity of service when foreign policy, pricing, or licensing shifts.A sovereign Sinhala large language model (LLM) changes that equation. It can be hosted locally, audited locally, fine-tuned for Sri Lankan contexts, and continue to operate regardless of what any foreign tech company decides next. Opening the door to Sinhala-speaking AI assistants for Government services, educational tools for Sinhala-medium students, healthcare information for elderly and rural users, accessibility tools for citizens who do not speak English, and natural-sounding customer service for local businesses.This team did it with two GPUs over a few weeks of training, and had to build its datasets from scratch because no large, clean Sinhala corpus existed. The team scraped Sinhala news sites, books, and online sources, and used Hindi datasets as a starting point, Hindi and Sinhala share Indo-Aryan roots, to build a final dataset of around 3.6 million question-answer pairs and four billion tokens, one of the largest public Sinhala AI datasets, now freely available on Hugging Face.The team also redesigned how the model reads Sinhala. The original Llama tokeniser needed an average of 91 tokens per Sinhala sentence and failed on 97.5 per cent of Sinhala characters at the byte level. After adding around 35,000 Sinhala-specific tokens, that dropped to 23 tokens per sentence and zero byte-level failures.The project was conducted at the Moratuwa University’s Electrical Engineering Department, led by the Chief Executive Officer of Decryptogen, Sanjeewa Alwis, Senior IEEE Member of the Institute of Maritime Technologies and Propulsion Systems at the German Aerospace Centre, Dr&nbsp; Chathura Wanigasekara, and IEEE Member and Senior Lecturer at the Department, Dr&nbsp; Logeeshan Velmanickam. Dr&nbsp; Wanigasekara and Dr&nbsp; Logeeshan are the corresponding authors.The core engineering work , model training, dataset construction, tokeniser redesign, and evaluation was carried out by PK Udith I Sandaruwan, Nimesh MA Fonseka, and IEEE Student Member Pamith C Salwathura, all University graduates, working in collaboration with the Decryptogen Research and Development team. They earlier presented a preliminary version of the work at the IEEE AI Internet of Things Congress in the US in 2025; the IEEE Access paper.Next steps include longer training runs, larger and more diverse Sinhala datasets, and deployments in assistive technologies and conversational systems for Sinhala speakers. The full paper, End-to-End Adaptation of LLMs for Low-Resource Languages will appear in IEEE Access. The datasets are publicly available on Hugging Face.

SL AI research team trains working Sinhala LLM 

An official attached to the Immigration and Emigration Department was arrested yesterday (14) by the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) over an alleged financial fraud linked to the installation of a software system.&nbsp;The suspect, identified as K Herath, served as the Department’s Controller of Information Technology and Border Control.&nbsp;The arrest was carried out following an investigation by the Financial Crimes Investigation Division of the CID. According to investigators, a sum of over Rs&nbsp; 9.8 million had been paid for the installation of software identified as the “User Management Module.”&nbsp;However, the authorities allege that the software was never installed and that Government funds were fraudulently obtained without delivering the system. Police stated that the arrest was made under the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act. Further investigations are underway regarding the alleged misuse and misappropriation of public funds.

Immigration official held over Rs 9.8 m fraud 

The Inter-University Students’ Federation (IUSF) yesterday (14) staged a protest demanding that the controversial Malwana property, widely known as an ownerless estate, be handed over for public use, including for universities.&nbsp;The protesters said that the move was intended to remind the current Government of its pledge to “return to the people the properties stolen from the people” when it came to power. The IUSF called on the authorities to allocate the land and house for the use of universities facing space constraints as well as for broader public purposes.The property, which spans around 15 acres, had previously been taken over by the Justice Ministry after no legal owner was identified. The development followed statements made to court by lawyers representing former Minister Basil Rajapaksa, informing the Judiciary that he had no connection to the property.&nbsp;A court later ordered the house and land be auctioned. During the aragalaya protest movement, parts of the property were set on fire by unidentified individuals, causing partial damage to the house. Although there were later plans to establish an International Judges’ Research and Training Centre at the site, the proposal has remained inactive for an extended period.The IUSF has now formally requested that the property be transferred for student and public use.Speaking to The Daily Morning, IUSF Convenor, Sasindu Perera, said they entered the house in Malwana during the daytime with around 100 students representing all the State universities, and that they will not leave the property until progressive remedies are given for the issues of university students.&nbsp;According to him, although the Police had tried to stop the students from entering the building, they entered forcefully, disregarding Police barriers. No injuries were reported, and no one has been arrested so far. Police and security forces have been deployed at the location to handle the situation.&nbsp;“The issue of the lack of facilities for universities is a long-standing issue that we have been demanding answers for years for. Yet, we have not been given any progressive answer so far. These properties are being taken away by the Government, yet, to date, they are not being used for any purpose. So, we demand to use these properties to enlarge university facilities,” he added. He further stated that there are other places, such as houses in Gampaha, Oruthotapara and Kataragama, that are also being taken away from owners but have not been put to any use. “The education sector is one of the most suitable sectors that these resources can be invested in,” he said.&nbsp;

IUSF demands Malwana property 

Owners of two tourist hotels in Matara have been convicted for selling bottled drinking water above the regulated maximum retail price (MRP), with the Matara Magistrate’s Court imposing a total fine of Rs&nbsp; one million. The verdict was delivered after the Consumer Affairs Authority filed charges before the Court on Wednesday (13).Investigations conducted by the Matara District office of the Authority, following public complaints, found that the two hotels had been selling bottled water at prices exceeding the legally permitted MRP. It was revealed that a one-litre bottle of drinking water, which carries a MRP of Rs&nbsp; 100, was sold for Rs&nbsp; 450, while a 500 millilitres bottle priced at Rs&nbsp; 70 was sold for Rs&nbsp; 300.The Court imposed a fine of Rs&nbsp; 500,000 on each hotel.The Authority urged consumers to check the MRP, expiry date, and receipt when purchasing goods, and reminded the public that complaints regarding overcharging can be submitted with evidence via the hotline 1977.

Above-MRP bottled water:  Tourist hotels fined Rs 1 m

<ul><li>Chinese Envoy urges IOR maritime cooperation, regional partnerships, sustainable development, maritime security and governance</li></ul>The Pathfinder Foundation on Wednesday (13) hosted the ‘Colombo Maritime Dialogue’, bringing together regional experts and diplomats to discuss maritime cooperation and security in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR). The dialogue saw participation from a professional team representing China, India, Singapore, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. The dialogue was held under the theme: “Fostering Win-Win Cooperation in the IOR through Enhanced Mutual Understanding, Development-Oriented Collaboration, the Integration of Security and Development, and the Diversification of Discourse.”Addressing the gathering, the Ambassador of the People’s Republic of China to Sri Lanka, Qi Zhenhong underscored the importance of maritime cooperation and regional partnerships in the IOR. He urged strengthening China–Sri Lanka maritime cooperation and promoting the sustainable development of the IOR. Speaking on the strategic significance of the Indian Ocean, he noted that the region has historically served as a vital link for global trade and cultural exchange. He highlighted Sri Lanka’s geopolitical importance as a key node along East–West maritime routes and acknowledged the country’s growing role in regional cooperation. Referring to the dialogue’s theme, he said that discussions on maritime security and governance, sustainable maritime development, and regional partnerships are important for the future stability and prosperity of the region. He further stressed that maritime cooperation remained essential for Sri Lanka’s economic growth and public welfare. He noted that bilateral cooperation between China and Sri Lanka had expanded in areas such as port development, shipping logistics, the marine economy, and disaster prevention and mitigation. He also referred to ongoing marine scientific research cooperation between the two countries and expressed hope that the Sri Lankan Government would make decisions “in consideration of its own sovereignty, dignity and interests.” Highlighting future cooperation, he recalled that both countries agreed to further strengthen maritime collaboration based on equality, and mutual trust and benefit. Planned areas of cooperation include marine environmental protection, maritime domain awareness and rescue operations, disaster relief, and capacity building. Reiterating China’s support for peace and stability in the IOR, he said that the Ocean should not become “an arena for major-power contest” but instead serve as “a broad stage for mutual benefit and cooperation.”

Pathfinder hosts Colombo Maritime Dialogue

The Indian Naval Ship (INS) Sunayna as Indian Ocean Ship (IOS) Sagar with a multinational crew from 16 countries is scheduled to arrive in Colombo today (15). The crew comprises officers and sailors from Bangladesh, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, the Maldives, Mauritius, Mozambique, Myanmar, Singapore, the Seychelles, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Thailand, Timor Leste, and the UAE, in Indian Naval training establishments.&nbsp;

Medical ordinance to be amended

CEB dissolution: Consumers query lack of relief

CEB dissolution: Consumers que ...

Money laundering case: Yoshitha’s objection on conspiracy charge rejec ...

Money laundering case: Yoshith ...

SL AI research team trains working Sinhala LLM

SL AI research team trains wor ...

Immigration official held over Rs 9.8 m fraud

Immigration official held over ...

IUSF demands Malwana property

IUSF demands Malwana property

Above-MRP bottled water: Tourist hotels fined Rs 1 m

Above-MRP bottled water: Tour ...

Pathfinder hosts Colombo Maritime Dialogue

Pathfinder hosts Colombo Marit ...

INS Sunayna-IOS Sagar to Col. Port

INS Sunayna-IOS Sagar to Col. ...

CEB dissolution: Consumers query lack of relief

CEB dissolution: Consumers que ...

Money laundering case: Yoshitha’s objection on conspiracy charge rejec ...

Money laundering case: Yoshith ...

SL AI research team trains working Sinhala LLM

SL AI research team trains wor ...

Immigration official held over Rs 9.8 m fraud

Immigration official held over ...

IUSF demands Malwana property

IUSF demands Malwana property

Above-MRP bottled water: Tourist hotels fined Rs 1 m

Above-MRP bottled water: Tour ...

Pathfinder hosts Colombo Maritime Dialogue

Pathfinder hosts Colombo Marit ...

INS Sunayna-IOS Sagar to Col. Port

INS Sunayna-IOS Sagar to Col. ...

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CEB dissolution: Consumers query lack of relief

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IUSF demands Malwana property

IUSF demands Malwana property

Above-MRP bottled water: Tourist hotels fined Rs 1 m

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