Search Results for: Sri Lankan

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE UN Food & Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is advising tea-exporting countries to stimulate demand in their domestic markets, because major growing sales are unlikely in traditional importers of black tea, such as Britain and Russia. Here, "scope for expansion in consumption is quite limited…but in the countries where tea is produced the per capita consumption is much lower and so there is a lot more market potential," said Kaison Chang, secretary of FAO’s inter-governmental group on tea.…

BY MUNZA MUSHTAQ

INTIMIDATING armed guards, strict security procedures and daunting anti-aircraft missiles appear to be history for the Bandaranaike International Airport (BIA) (NOTE – SPELLING IS CORRECT), Sri Lanka’s only international airport, 40 kilometres from its capital Colombo.

The airport, formerly dubbed a ‘fortress’ due to its heavy military presence during the recently ended civil war, is now looking at transforming itself into the "safest and friendliest" airport in the world without the cumbersome security procedures that attended the three-decade-long armed struggle with the Tamil Tigers.…

BY MARK GODFREY

MALAYSIA’S emergence as an airport centre for Asia’s low fare airlines has hit turbulence in a squabble between the country’s aviation authority and the region’s fastest growing airline, Kuala Lumpur-based Air Asia. At issue – the expansion of airport capacity for low fare airlines.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE TOWN of Asbestos in French-speaking Québec, Canada – named after the mineral that underpins its economy – is waiting to see whether its provincial government will approve a Canadian dollar CAD58 million (US dollar USD56 million) loan enabling an underground mine to tap an immense deposit.…

BY KARRYN MILLER

AS trade barriers continue to diminish, clothing brands are becoming more global. However it is not as easy for the sizes of their goods to be quite as worldly. International players need to adapt their fits for different target markets but that level of adaptation varies by country.…

BY MUNZA MUSHTAQ

THE TOBACCO industry in Sri Lanka is facing tough times. With increasingly hostile anti-tobacco regulations and a burgeoning illicit market, a public promise was made last summer by the now re-elected and powerful Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa to eradicate tobacco consumption from his island nation by 2015.…

BY MUNZA MUSHTAQ

SRI Lanka is hoping to capitalise on its natural beauty to become a tourist hotspot, given that its three-decade long bloody civil war is now over. But Munza Mushtaq reports that because of ignorance on the part of local authorities, the country could become a hotspot for something far less welcome – commercial crime.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

A YEAR of struggle would be the best way to sum up 2009 as far as the global clothing and textile industry is concerned. The depth and severity of the worldwide recession left many clothing and textile companies reeling, even impacting upon China, which had previously been dominating global markets.…

By Katherine Dunn, International News Services

The travails of Roman Polanski in Switzerland this autumn have offered some lessons to the world’s wanted over extradition laws and how to deal with them. The Polish director has of course been living in France, with little fear of extradition, since 1978, when he fled the USA facing statutory rape charges. Only now of course this autumn was he arrested on an American warrant on a visit to Switzerland, while movie stars and directors crowed for his release.

Now, he is out on bail, secured with the help of French president Nicholas Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni, who intervened on Polanski’s behalf. 

As Polanski languishes in Alpine house arrest in a luxury Swiss chalet, it’s clear that extradition is still, at base, a political decision – and to avoid it, one key is not supporting international causes unpopular with powerful governments.…

By Raghavendra Verma, in New Delhi

India is the latest example of a country struggling against a Maoist insurgency fuelled by rural inequality, showing how emerging market governments worldwide risk harbouring violent rebel groups while promoting economic development.

In Peru, the notorious Maoist guerrilla group ‘The Shining Path’ continue operations, funded by the illicit drug trade, after a major insurgency in the 1980s and 1990s failed to achieve its political ends. In Nepal, an armed insurgency was successful, ending with a peace accord in 2006, its Communist Party of Nepal (Unified-Maoist) (CPN-UM) joining the country’s parliament and briefly leading its government.…