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Anura Kumara Dissanayake leads early Sri Lanka vote count

Published

4 hours ago

September 22, 2024

Anura Kumara Dissanayake leads early Sri Lanka vote count

Anura Kumara Dissanayake, a leftist politician, is leading Sri Lanka’s presidential election.

The election on Saturday is the first to be held since mass protests unseated the country’s leader, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, in 2022 after the country suffered its worst economic crisis.

Dissanayake promised voters tough anti-corruption measures and good governance – messages that have resonated strongly with voters who have been clamouring for systematic change since the crisis.

The latest results on Sunday morning showed Dissanayake had won 42% of the votes counted. A candidate needs 51% to be declared the winner.

Opposition leader Sajith Premadasa is in second place with nearly 32% of the total vote. President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who is seeking a second term, has so far received 16% while Namal Rajapaksa, the nephew of the ousted president has got close to 3%.

If a candidate fails to secure 51% of the votes in the first round of counting, a second round will be held to include voters’ second and third choice for president.

All of Sri Lanka’s eight presidential elections since 1982 have seen the winner emerge during the first round of counting. This election has been described as one of the closest in the country’s history.

Seventeen million Sri Lankans were eligible to vote on Saturday and the country’s elections commission said it was the most peaceful in the country’s history.

Still, police announced a curfew late Saturday night citing “public safety. It was extended until noon local time (06:30 GMT).

Although he has not yet received the required number of votes to win, Dissanayake has received messages of congratulations from supporters of his two main rivals, Wickremesinghe and Premadasa.

Foreign Minister Ali Sabry said on X that early results clearly pointed to a victory by Dissanayake.

“Though I heavily campaigned for President Ranil Wickremesinghe, the people of Sri Lanka have made their decision, and I fully respect their mandate for Anura Kumara Dissanayake,” he said.

MP Harsha de Silva, who supported Premadasa, said he called Dissanayake to offer his congratulations.

“We campaigned hard for @sajithpremadasa but it was not to be. It is now clear @anuradisanayake will be the new President of #SriLanka,” said de Silva, who represents Colombo in parliament.

Another Premadasa supporter, Tamil National Alliance (TNA) spokesman MA Sumanthiran, said Dissanayake delivered an “impressive win” without relying on “racial or religious chauvinism”.

The country’s new president will be faced with the twin tasks of reviving the economy and lifting millions from crushing poverty.

An economic meltdown fueled the “Aragalaya” (struggle) uprising that unseated Rajapaksa from the presidential palace in 2022.

At that time, Sri Lanka’s foreign currency reserves had dried up, leaving the country unable to import essentials such as fuel. Public debt had ballooned to $83bn while inflation zoomed to 70%.

This made basics like food and medicine unaffordable to to ordinary people.

The country’s economic misery has been blamed on major policy errors, weak exports and years of under-taxation. This was exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, which choked tourism, a key economic driver.

But many people have also blamed corruption and mismanagement, fuelling anger against Rajapaksa and his family, who collectively ruled Sri Lanka for more than 10 years.

Wickremesinghe had secured a $2.9bn lifeline from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which is crucial to opening additional funding channels, but comes with strict economic and governance policy reforms.

Sri Lanka is restructuring the terms of its debt payments with foreign and domestic lenders, as mandated by the IMF. The main focus has been the country’s $36bn in foreign debt, of which $7bn is owed to China, its largest bilateral creditor.

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Amazon and UK government at odds over working from home

Published

7 mins ago

September 22, 2024

NewsAdmin

Amazon and UK government at odds over working from home

BBC Montage Image: On the left side a man works from home at his desk, and pets a dog. On the right side a woman stands at her desk in an office environment, and passes a file through to the man working from home. A cat crosses the divide between the two images.

They are two competing views on where desk-based employees work best.

Amazon is ordering its staff back to the office five days a week, just as the government is pushing for rights to flexible working – including working from home – to be strengthened.

The tech giant says employees will be able to better “invent, collaborate, and be connected”.

But just as the firm’s announcement became news, the UK government was linking flexibility to better performance and a more productive, loyal workforce.

Few are short of an opinion on how effective working from home is and for a government there are broader considerations such as how, for example, caring responsibilities are affected.

But more than four years since the start of the pandemic, what does the evidence tell us about how we work best and is Amazon right to believe people being in the office full time will allow them to collaborate better?

Amazon’s fellow tech giant Microsoft studied its employees during the pandemic. It looked at the emails, calendars, instant messages and calls of 61,000 of its employees in the US during the first six months of 2020. The findings were published in Nature Human Behaviour.

The study indicated that, during Covid, remote workers tended to collaborate more with networks of colleagues they already had, and that they built fewer “bridges” between different networks.

There was also a drop in communication that happened in real time – meetings that would have happened in real life weren’t necessarily happening online. Instead, more emails and instant messages were sent.

The authors suggested this may make it harder to convey and understand complex information.

Amazon is among a number of companies telling employees to return to the office full-time

Line chart showing the percentage of people aged 16 and over in Great Britain who said they had worked from home only, away from home only, or a mixture of both in the last week. In the year to September 2024, an average of 42% said they only travelled to work, 13% said they only worked from home, while 27% said they adopted a hybrid approach. The percentage reporting a hybrid working pattern has risen since 2021, while the percentage only working from home has dropped. — Amazon is among a number of companies telling employees to return to the office full-time

Microsoft’s was a data-led study. But what about human experience?

A 2020 survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) of 1,000 senior decision-makers in organisations found about a third struggled with “reduced staff interaction and cooperation”.

However, more than 40% of the managers said there was more collaboration when people were working from home.

Greater collaboration is hard to object to, but equally it is no guarantee of productivity.

In 2010, China’s biggest travel agency CTrip tried something very new among staff in its airfare and hotel booking department.

Almost 250 staff were identified as potential home workers – they needed to be established at the company and have a proper home working set-up.

Around half that group started working from home. The other group stayed office-based.

Researchers at Stanford University found the workers were 13% more productive when working from home – mainly because workers had fewer breaks and sick days, and they could take more calls because it was quieter.

Communication barriers

There was a particularly significant drop in staff quitting for non-managers, women, and people with long commutes, the researchers said.

However, those Chinese home-workers were seeing a bit of the office: they were spending one day a week among colleagues. It could be this brought some benefit – a separate study years later from researchers at Stanford suggested fully remote work can lead to a 10% drop in productivity compared with working in the office all the time.

Barriers to communication, lack of mentoring for staff, problems building a work culture, and difficulties with self-motivation were all cited.

Amazon is not alone in telling employees to return to the office full-time.

Goldman Sachs chief executive David Solomon famously described working from home as an “aberration”. The US firm requires bankers to be in the office five days per week.

Rival US banks JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley have also backed workers returning to the office, whereas some banks in Europe have taken a softer approach.

Elon Musk’s Tesla also requires employees to be in the office full time, leading to reports of problems finding space for them.

Another Musk company, SpaceX, brought in a policy requiring workers to return to the office full-time.

But it wasn’t without consequences: when it brought the policy in, SpaceX lost 15% of its senior-level employees, according to a study published earlier this year.

The pandemic changed work routines that were in many cases decades old.

Linda Noble, now 62, from Barnsley, was used to putting on a suit and make-up. In 2020 she was a senior officer in local government, scrutinising governance in the fire service and the police service.

Then Covid struck and she was working from home.

“I loathed it. I missed the communication – going into work, someone would make you smile,” she says.

But with time, Ms Noble adjusted. She set up her home office and she thinks that before long she was twice as productive as previously – even if that was in part because of an inability to switch off.

Many disabled people also believe working from home makes them more productive.

A 2023 study of 400 people suggested that disabled workers felt they had more autonomy and control when working from home, which led them to better manage their health and wellbeing, and 85% felt more productive.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, not all studies come to the same conclusions. Some suggest an improvement to physical health from working at home, others disagree. The same goes for mental health.

The wellbeing of staff was a key reason one UK business decided to get them back to the office as soon as possible after lockdown restrictions ended, according to one of its directors, Francis Ashcroft.

Part of a team

He was chief executive of a large private UK children’s care services company. He says “some people were struggling with raised anxiety” and wanted to get back to the office “to be part of a team”.

Mr Ashcroft said there was “also a recognition that 80% of staff were at the coalface”, working in person in children’s homes and education, and so it was “right to come back” for reasons of fairness.

Although team members were collaborating online at 95% of what they had been, “coming back into the office added that 5% back”, he argues.

“It brought a realness and a sense of belonging,” Mr Ashcroft says, adding that “when it comes to delivering a service, the teamwork was much better in the office”.

Despite this experience, an umbrella review of home working that examined a range of other studies concluded that, on the whole, working from home boosts how much workers can get done.

What difference there is in approach between the government and Amazon essentially boils down to whether or not some home working should be part of the mix, with Amazon believing it shouldn’t.

Linda Noble’s time solely working from home is over. She is just about to start a hybrid job. She’s attracted by the “balance” between working from home and office work.

Reduce churn

According to the CIPD, benefits of hybrid working include “a better work/life balance, greater ability to focus with fewer distractions, more time for family and friends and wellbeing activity, saved commuting time and costs, plus higher levels of motivation and engagement.”

And it may be that this can reduce staff churn. A study published this year found that a Chinese firm that adopted hybrid working reduced the rate at which employees quit by a third.

From an employee perspective, the optimum time for hybrid working is three days in the office – this makes employees most engaged, according to a Gallup survey of US workers, although it also says there is “no one-size-fits-all”.

In the UK, the number of people exclusively working from home is falling. But, crucially, hybrid working is continuing to rise, running at 27% of the working population.

Gallup says that despite highly publicised moves by firms to get employees back in the office, the underlying trend is that the future of office work is hybrid.

This tallies with the position of the UK government, which is clear that it believes the potential to work at home drives up productivity.

The calculation by Amazon appears to be that what evidence there is for increased productivity among employees who work in part from home fails to capture the particulars of how they operate.

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Motel 6 sold to Indian hotel operator for $525 million

Published

11 mins ago

September 22, 2024

NewsAdmin

Motel 6 sold to Indian hotel operator for $525 million

The budget motel chain Motel 6 is being acquired by the parent company of Oyo, a hotel operator based in India.

The New York-based investment firm Blackstone, which owns Motel 6’s parent company G6 Hospitality, announced Friday that the deal would be an all-cash transaction worth $525 million.

The transaction will also include the sale of the Studio 6 motel brand, which caters to customers seeking extended stays. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year.

Oyo, which launched in India just over a decade ago, has been expanding its footprint in the U.S. over the past few years. The company says it currently operates 320 hotels across 35 states and is aiming to add 250 more this year.

“This acquisition is a significant milestone for a startup company like us to strengthen our international presence,” Gautam Swaroop, OYO’s international division chief, said in a statement.

Blackstone had purchased Motel 6 and Studio 6 in 2012 for $1.9 billion. Since then, the private equity giant says it has heavily invested in the brand and pursued a strategy that converted the chain into a franchise.

“This transaction is a terrific outcome for investors and is the culmination of an ambitious business plan that more than tripled our investors’ capital and generated over $1 billion in profit over our hold period,” Rob Harper, the head of Blackstone Real Estate Asset Management Americas, said in a statement.

Under the deal, Oravel Stays, which owns Oyo, will acquire G6 Hospitality.

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FBI’s Crime Data May Demonstrate Political Maneuvering

Published

32 mins ago

September 22, 2024

NewsAdmin

1.5K

In an October 2023 article, The Appeal highlighted the FBI’s latest annual report on crime in the United States for 2022. Author Ethan Corey discusses how although crime rates are on a steady decline, the message from corporate media is quite the opposite, with headlines such as “The most dangerous cities in America” and “Violent crime decreases to pre-pandemic levels, but property crime is on the rise.” Such attention-grabbing articles don’t reflect what is truly happening.

Corey deftly explains how incomplete FBI crime data really is, with sexual assault, organized crime, and white-collar crime being chronically ignored, and nearly a third of police agencies never reporting any data at all. Police chiefs want to emphasize street-level crimes because that’s how they justify their budgets; therefore, the FBI crime data emphasizes these crimes above all others.

Other topics in the article include how little vetting for accuracy actually occurs, and how often the numbers have been systemically manipulated to hide the truth—so often, and in so many jurisdictions, that the problem appears pervasive.

While the FBI’s crime data can’t be ignored, a crime story based only on that one source would be untrustworthy on its face. To help reporters, activists, and all citizens, The Appeal also provides a helpful list of ways to use the data responsibly and thoughtfully.

Corporate media, such as the New York Times and Washington Post, have covered FBI’s 2022 crime data but have not examined possible data manipulation and other discrepancies. This single article is a valuable corrective to the invalid notions millions of Americans have about crime in their nation, notions propagated by career police and their political allies.

Source: Ethan Corey, “FBI Crime Data for 2022 is Out. Here’s What You Need To Know,” The Appeal, October 16, 2023.

Student Researcher: Quinlan Stacy (Frostburg State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Andy Duncan (Frostburg State University)

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Business

meet the next generation of AI-powered assistants

Published

40 mins ago

September 22, 2024

NewsAdmin

Move over, copilots: it’s time to make room for the AI agents.

That has been the message from the software industry in recent days, as some of the biggest companies have lined up behind the latest idea for how to turn generative artificial intelligence into a staple of working life.

Microsoft, Salesforce and Workday this week put agents at the centre of their AI plans, while Oracle and ServiceNow have also used the industry’s annual round of user conferences this month to promote the idea.

AI assistants known as copilots — a term first popularised by Microsoft — have become the software industry’s main response to the generative AI unleashed by the launch of ChatGPT nearly two years ago.

The latest wave of AI agents are designed to go further and take actions on behalf of users. While agents have become the newest front in the battle between tech giants like OpenAI and Google, they have also turned into the software industry’s latest attempt to sell generative AI to business customers.

The evolution reflects both an advance in the underlying technology, as well as a new marketing pitch from an industry looking to capitalise on a heavily hyped technology that has yet to have much impact on its revenues.

If the industry’s claims prove true, the move from AI assistants to agents could also open the door to a far more disruptive phase in the evolution of generative AI, both for workers affected by the technology as well as software companies themselves.

Behind the spread of agents — also widely referred to as “agentic” systems — lie a number of advances in the underlying technology since the first generative AI chatbots.

Greater memory enables the systems to retain a better understanding of context, while planning capabilities have advanced. Agents also often connect to other systems through APIs — application programming interfaces — meaning they can take actions on behalf of a user rather than just return information.

The latest wave of agents is designed to act as an extension of the copilots that came before rather than replace them completely. According to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, his company’s copilot software is evolving into an “enterprise orchestration layer”, a conversational interface through which workers will be able to create and use agents to carry out specific tasks.

Initially, AI agents are mainly being promoted as tools to take over simple, routine actions, like filling out an expenses report.

But some companies are already touting their ability to handle more complex tasks, or even take over some jobs completely. Automating customer support systems has been a main area of focus, potentially replacing large numbers of call-centre workers.

So far, generative AI has done little to lift the revenue growth of software companies.

The entire software industry is still in “‘show me’ mode on copilots or AI agents”, says Jim Tierney, a growth stock investor at AllianceBernstein. “It is still an open question exactly how this is going to be monetised,” he added.

Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce, suggested there was a lack of traction for copilots, telling the FT: “Microsoft has deceived customers with their AI strategy, they don’t need to DIY it. We build it into our platform, customers shouldn’t be forced to train and retrain their models.”

The software companies are betting that customers will see direct productivity benefits in agents that can take on entire tasks.

According to Microsoft’s Nadella, as AI systems like these become increasingly capable, “models themselves become more of a commodity and all value gets created by how you ground, steer and fine-tune these models with your business data and workflow”.

As agents take on more of the workload, that could put companies like Apple, with its dominant smartphone platform, and Microsoft, with its desktop productivity apps, in the best place to win, said Tierney.

For now, the full implications of that shift are likely to be muted, as the tendency of generative AI systems to “hallucinate” makes users cautious about allowing them to take unsupervised actions.

“I’m sceptical, and even a little bit nervous” about the widespread use of agents, said Barry Briggs, a former chief technology officer at Microsoft and now an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm.

The probabilistic nature of the technology means that customers will not be able to use the technology for important tasks, but instead will have to build it into work processes that give workers the final say, he added.

Yet some companies already claim to be taking the technology to its logical conclusion. Last month Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Swedish fintech company Klarna, said his company was on the way to halving its workforce with AI.

Siemiatkowski also made waves in the software industry by saying Klarna would abandon Salesforce and Workday completely and instead use AI to develop the software it needs to run its business. That claim is widely seen as an outlier in the tech world given the current state of the technology, though it points to what some claim will be a far more disruptive future.

Most software investors, however, are betting the big winners will be the existing powers in the software industry — even if it is still unclear how or when the pay-off from technology will come.

As extensions of copilots, agents are merely the latest step in the attempt by today’s leading software companies to stake out the territory and prepare themselves for the time when generative AI has advanced to a point where it can deliver real productivity gains, said Kevin Walkush, a portfolio manager at Jensen Investment Management.

The current generation of agents were unlikely to do much for software company revenues, he added, but: “It’s all about establishing their beachheads and long-term positioning.”

Even if the incumbents are best placed to win, the shift towards agent-based systems could still cause upheaval in the way they do business. Most have charged customers a licence fee based on the number of workers who use their software — a model that would be threatened if AI agents make a serious dent in staff counts.

In response, most software companies have started to test usage-based pricing that ties their revenue to query volumes. Salesforce, for instance, says it will charge $2 for each “conversation” with its AI agents. Many also talk about a shift to outcome-based pricing that will allow them to share in some of the gains that customers get from using the software, though it is unclear how this might work.

“It’s early, we don’t know how the pricing models will play out,” said Byron Deeter, a partner in Bessemer Venture Partners and investor in early-stage software companies.

Like the move to the cloud, when a change in the way software companies book revenues caused a period of turmoil for the industry, the shift to a new pricing model for AI “might be bumpy for public [software] companies”, he added.

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Death toll rises from strike that killed Hezbollah commanders

Published

53 mins ago

September 22, 2024

NewsAdmin

Death toll rises from strike that killed Hezbollah commanders

Medical personnel work at the site of Friday’s Israeli strike, as search and rescue operations continued on Saturday

Reuters Medical personnel work at the site of Friday's Israeli strike, as search and rescue operations continued on Saturday — Medical personnel work at the site of Friday’s Israeli strike, as search and rescue operations continued on Saturday

The number of people killed in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut on Friday has risen significantly, Lebanese officials say, with several children and women among the dead.

All day on Saturday, rescuers searched through the rubble after a high-rise building collapsed and others were partially destroyed in the attack.

Excavators were brought in to help clear the debris as medical staff surveyed the scene and people waited for news of those who were still missing.

The attack, which hit the densely populated neighbourhood of Dahieh, a Hezbollah stronghold in southern Beirut, killed at least 37 people, including three children, and wounded 68 others, Lebanon’s health ministry said.

The airstrike was Israel’s third on the Lebanese capital this year and has been seen as a major escalation in the region that has added to fears of an all-out war. A senior UN official, Rosemary Di Carlo, warned that the Middle East was at risk of a conflict that could “dwarf” the devastation witnessed in the region so far.

Hezbollah, the powerful Iranian-backed militia and political group, confirmed the death of Ibrahim Aqil, a senior commander in the group’s elite Radwan forces. The group also confirmed that Ahmed Wahbi, himself a top Radwan figure, died in the attack.

Reacting to the attack, the Lebanese health minister, Dr Firass Abiad, said it was a “violation of international humanitarian law”.

“The fact is that those children and those women who were killed were not members of Hezbollah,” he said. “Those were civilians that happened to be nearby”.

Hezbollah members carry the coffin of Hassan Youssef Abdel Sater who was killed on Friday in an Israeli strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs

Reuters Hezbollah members carry the coffin, draped in yellow, of Hassan Youssef Abdel Sater who was killed on Friday in an Israeli strike on Beirut's southern suburbs — Hezbollah members carry the coffin of Hassan Youssef Abdel Sater who was killed on Friday in an Israeli strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs

Israel’s military issued an update on Friday’s strike in southern Lebanon, saying it had killed a dozen senior commanders in Hezbollah’s elite Radwan force.

In what it described as a “precise strike”, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said those targeted in Beirut had been meeting in Dahieh, a known stronghold of the Iran-backed group in the Lebanese capital.

In a separate post on X, an IDF spokesperson added 12 of those killed in the Beirut strike were senior members of the Iran-backed group at the “top of Hezbollah’s leadership”.

Lebanon’s health minister says at least 37 people are now known to have been killed

EPA Emergency workers use excavators to clear the rubble at the site which was targeted by an Israeli strike the previous day, in the southern suburb of Beirut, Lebanon — Lebanon’s health minister says at least 37 people are now known to have been killed

In addition to the death of Aqil, Hezbollah also confirmed that Ahmed Wahbi, himself a top Radwan figure, died in the attack that hit the densely populated Dahieh area – a stronghold of the group.

How Hezbollah is going to respond isn’t clear. It doesn’t want to spark a wider war with Israel.

Hezbollah’s main supporter, Iran, does not want a major confrontation either.

But the latest air strikes happened days after a wave of explosions of pagers and walkie-talkies used by the group killed dozens, wounded thousands more and caused panic in a country already exhausted by almost one year of conflict.

From the device explosions on Tuesday and Wednesday, 152 people are still in a critical condition and 777 more being treated in hospital for their wounds, Dr Abiad said.

The number of those killed over the two days of explosions has risen to 39.

Twelve people were killed in Tuesday’s attack, while the number of those killed on Wednesday is up to 27, he added.

On Thursday, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah blamed Israel for attacks, saying it had crossed “all red lines” and vowed “just punishment”.

Israel has not claimed responsibility.

UN human rights chief Volker Türk said the pager and walkie-talkie explosions this week in Lebanon violated international humanitarian law.

Cross-border fighting between Israel and Hezbollah escalated on 8 October 2023 – the day after the unprecedented attack on Israel by Hamas gunmen from Gaza – when Hezbollah fired at Israeli positions in solidarity with the Palestinians.

Since then, hundreds of people, most of them Hezbollah fighters, have been killed in the cross-border fighting, while tens of thousands have also been displaced on both sides of the border.

Israel recently added the return of people displaced from the north of the country to its list of war goals.

Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said on Thursday Israel was entering a “new phase of the war”, concentrating more of its efforts on the north.

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Sri Lankan election heads into run-off with leftist outsider in the lead

Published

1 hour ago

September 22, 2024

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Sri Lanka’s presidential election has headed into a run-off, with leftist outsider Anura Kumara Dissanayake leading the vote count but failing to pass the 50 per cent threshold needed for an outright victory in the south Asian country’s first election since it fell into default.

Dissanayake, a neo-Marxist candidate was leading with 40 per cent of the vote with about half of the ballots tallied on Sunday, according to the election commission.

Under Sri Lanka’s electoral rules, voters can rank second and third-choice candidates. If no candidate receives more than 50 per cent, those second-preference votes are added to the tally of the two leading candidates to determine a winner.

Sajith Premadasa, the main opposition leader and son of a former president, was in second with about 32 per cent of Saturday’s vote. Incumbent President Ranil Wickremesinghe placed third, with about 16 per cent.

Analysts said a victory for Dissanayake would be a stunning political upset in Sri Lanka and cast new doubts on its fragile $3bn IMF-backed debt restructuring in the country that has endured two years of economic crisis and austerity.

His National People’s Power coalition has just three MPs in the 225-member parliament, which is dominated by parties backed by traditional elites.

Wickremesinghe, 75, took office in 2022 after Sri Lanka defaulted on its foreign debt and then-leader Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the country amid severe economic turmoil and power cuts.

He campaigned as a the guarantor of financial stability, and last week his government said it had reached a draft agreement with holders of Sri Lanka’s $12.5bn defaulted bonds that “almost completes” the restructuring. The deal will still require a formal sign-off from the IMF and creditors.

Dissanayake, 55, has pledged to maintain the IMF facility but wants alter some of its rigid conditions to grant more relief to the country’s 23mn people, about a quarter of whom are in poverty.

The NPP’s election manifesto called for a renegotiation of the IMF agreement to make it “more palatable and strengthened”, with more focus on relief for the poor.

On the campaign trail, Dissanayake also vowed to tackle corruption and slash privileges for the ruling class, such as generous pensions and car permits, and pledged to reopen all human rights cases involving the Rajapaksa regime during Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war.

“AKD benefited by a swing of all the votes of the Rajapaksa party towards him,” said Kusal Perera, a political commentator, referring to Dissanayake by his initials.

Harini Amarasuriya, an MP with the NPP, said the strong first-round result represented a rejection of “the traditional elite politics that was part of our culture”.

“This is not just a transfer of power from one party to another. It’s a real shift in power dynamics.”

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