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‘Aadara Sevana’ (Abode of Love) in Anuradhapura is a social service cum prayer centre run by the Methodist Church in Sri Lanka. It is located a few kilometres away from the Anuradhapura town at a place called Kundichchaankulama in Sinhala and Kundichchaankulam in Tamil. The relatively-unknown Methodist Centre in the North Central Province has been in the news lately for extremely-troubling reasons. Aadara Sevana was the target of a mob attack on Sunday, April 14, celebrated worldwide by Christians as Palm Sunday. The mob comprising 20 to 25 youths had issued death threats, pelted stones and thrown firecrackers. They later...

People in Sri Lanka's war-ravaged north casted an overwhelming majority of their votes to the candidates of the major Tamil party at the local government elections held on Saturday, the Colombo Page reported on Sunday. Despite the massive campaign launched by the ruling party United People's Freedom Alliance (UPFA) in the Northern districts where elections were held for the first time after 29 years, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), formerly controlled by the Tamil Tiger rebels, won 18 out of 26 councils. An estimated 60 percent of the 2.5 million eligible voters turned out to cast their ballots throughout the...

In pictures: Pilgrimage unites Sri Lankans The church sits on a site where there has been a shrine to the Virgin Mary for hundreds of years. Catholics, both Tamil and Sinhalese, and members of other faiths revere it.

NEW DELHI: External affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee on Tuesday made it clear that India has no sympathy for LTTE, but said that civilian Tamils have to be prevented from becoming victims of the conflict in the island nation. "We are for the fight against terrorists and all sorts of terrorism. Therefore, we have no sympathy for any terrorist activity indulged in by any organization, particularly LTTE (which) is a banned organization in India," he told reporters ahead of his Sri Lanka visit. He made the remarks hours before his departure for Sri Lanka, where the government has claimed to have...