{"id":11996,"date":"2019-11-21T12:49:50","date_gmt":"2019-11-21T07:49:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/?p=11996"},"modified":"2019-11-21T12:49:50","modified_gmt":"2019-11-21T07:49:50","slug":"sri-lankas-new-president-picks-brother-mahinda-rajapaksa-as-pm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/archives\/11996","title":{"rendered":"Sri Lanka&#8217;s New President Picks Brother Mahinda Rajapaksa as PM"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8211; Newly elected Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa on Wednesday named his brother Mahinda as Prime Minister, cementing the grip on power of a clan credited with crushing the Tamil Tigers a decade ago.<\/p>\n<p>Mahinda, a two-term president himself, is due to be sworn in as premier on Thursday following the resignation of Ranil Wickremesinghe after his party suffered a humiliating defeat at the weekend&#8217;s presidential polls.<\/p>\n<p>The Rajapaksa brothers are credited with brutally destroying the Tamil Tigers to end Sri Lanka&#8217;s decades-long civil war, with the security services they controlled accused of war crimes and multiple human rights abuses.<\/p>\n<p>A spokesman for the new administration said Rajapaksa, 74, will be sworn in by his younger brother Gotabaya, aged 70.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Prime Minister Rajapaksa will have his cabinet appointed shortly after taking his oath of office,&#8221; said spokesman Vijayananda Herath.<\/p>\n<p>Gotabaya was defence secretary under Mahinda during his decade as president which ended in January 2015.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8211; Newly elected Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa on Wednesday named his brother Mahinda as Prime Minister, cementing the grip on power of a clan credited with crushing the Tamil Tigers a decade ago. Mahinda, a two-term president himself, is due to be sworn in as premier on Thursday following the resignation of Ranil Wickremesinghe [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":11997,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-sri-lanka"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11996"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11996\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11998,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11996\/revisions\/11998"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}