Women comprise half of Sri Lankan population and today that population is represented in the Parliament by 13 woman parliamentarians. The country enjoys an excellent record on women's health, education and life expectancy in the South Asian region, where women play a very an active and supportive role, irrespective of party differences. The percentage of women members in Parliament has remained the same since the grant of universal franchise as less than 5% in any given Parliament. At the local government level, more shockingly, this statistic seems to be less than 1%. Yet in grass roots level support group, women take the lead. During election time women play a major role being the backbone of those campaign organisations. Deputy Minister Nirupama Rajapaksa Thalatha Athukorale Chandrani Bandara Dr. Sudarshanee Fernandopulle Considering the 225 political representatives who took oath last Tuesday as Members of Parliament, elected as well as nominated, only 13 were women. Being in the Parliament nearly 21 years Minister Sumedha G. Jayasena is the most senior woman MP among the elected members. Her name first appeared in the MP list in the Second Parliament of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka hailing from Moneragala from the SLFP ticket. Under the Mahinda Rajapaksa regime she held the post of Child Development and Women Empowerment Minister. It was first in 1994 Sumedha Jayasena became the Deputy Minister of Buddhist Affairs which she held till 1999. She was the Minister of Women's Affairs from 1999 - 2000 and from 2004 - 2005 was the Minister of Social Welfare. Rosy Senanayake Malini Fonseka Vijeyakala Maheswaran Kamala Ranathunga Upeksha Swarnamali In 2004 she was given the Ministerial post as Women Empowerment. She received 45,837 preferential votes under the United People's Freedom Alliance (UPFA) from the Moneragala district Sumedha P Jayasena took oaths as a Cabinet Minister last Friday and sworn in as the Minister of Parliamentary Affairs. The other woman parliamentarian who secured a ministerial portfolio is Pavithra Devi Wanniarachchi. She secured 110,220 preferential Votes from the Ratnapura district wining the second highest position from the UPFA. Her name first entered in the Minister list in 1994 where she held the position of Deputy of Minister of health and Social Services till 1998. Then from 1998 - 2000 she held the post of Deputy Minister of Health and Indigenous Medicine and in 2000 - 2001 she was appointed as a Minister responsible for Land and Plan Implementation. From 2004 to 2007 Pavithra Wanniarachchi was the Minister for Samurdhi and Poverty Alleviation and under Mahinda Rajapaksa regime she was the Minister of Youth Affairs. Last Friday she was sworn in as a Cabinet Minister and was appointed as the Minister for National Heritage and Cultural Affairs. Most of these women hail from political families, with their fathers, brothers or husbands having engaged in politics. Of the two ministers Sumedha G. Jayasena entered politics following her husband's assassination and Pavithra Wanniarachchi hails from a highly influential political family her father being a strong politician Dharmadasa Wanniarachchi. Three are former MPs - Nirupama Rajapaksa from the UPFA, Chandrani Bandara and Thalatha Athukorale from the United National Front (UNF). Two new MPs, Dr. Sudarshani Fernandopulle (UPFA) and Vijayakala Maheswaran (UNF) have taken to politics following the assassination of their husbands and are entered the Parliament for the first time. Rosy Senanayake, though not a new political figure also entered Parliament for the first time. She was the Opposition Leader of the Western Provincial Council and was a strong UNP member for a long time. The former Mrs Sri Lanka who held Good Will Ambassador Post is backed with a financially and socially strong family. Upeksha Swarnamali (UNF) is a complete newcomer to politics and was an upcoming actress in mega tele dramas. Out of the lot, Nirupama Rajapaksa hails from the Hambantota district was former Deputy Minister and a Minister. From 1994 - 1999 Nirupama held the Tourism and Aviation Minister post from 2000 to 2001 she held the Deputy Minister post for Womens' Affairs. From 1999 to 2000 she was the Minister of Plan Implementation. Today in the new Parliament she is Deputy Minister of Water Supply and Drainage. From the National list of the UPFA internationally acclaimed actress and queen of the silver screen Malini Fonseka and a veteran women's activist of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party Kamala Ranathunga enter the Legislature for the first time as MPs. Malini Fonseka could be well recognised for her many feats and the international recognition she gained has for the Sri Lankan cinema. Kamala Ranatunga is armed with a very convincing record of long and prestigious service in the fields of women's politics as well as promotion of women's right through the Women's Organisation of the Sri Lanka Freedom

(top)Being connected with Star Trek, Klingon is probably the best known conlang used in any television series or movie franchise. From its humble beginnings, Klingon (or tlhIngan Hol) has successfully become part of popular culture. It has been parodied in the pages of The Onion (July 28, 1999), used as part of the plot in a 2002 episode of the sitcom Frasier, and is available as one of the language options for displaying the Google search page. Klingon has a thriving community of enthusiasts, both online and in the “real” world, although Dr. Lawrence Schoen was once quoted as saying, “All the fiuent Klingon speakers can comfortably go out to dinner together” (Wired, Aug. 1996). So, break out your meqleH, pour yourself a cup of blood wine, and enjoy this introduction to the conlang of warriors. Qapla’! (Poster)Marc Okrand Creator of Klingon Marc Okrand is Director of Live Captioning at the National Captioning Institute (NCI) in Vienna, Virginia, near Washington, DC. Celebrating his 25th year at NCI in 2005, Okrand is a pioneer in the use of closed-captioning for live television broadcasts. He has a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, where he specialized in Native American languages. His dissertation, a grammar of Mutsun, remains a seminal work in the study of Costanoan languages. He taught linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and was a post-doctoral fellow in the Anthropology Department of the Smithsonian Institute. Dr. Okrand’s link to conlanging came about through a chance meeting in California while on assignment for NCI’s first major live captioning event, the 1982 Academy Awards. Okrand met a long-time friend for lunch who was working with Harve Bennett, Executive Director of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The movie needed a linguist to create some dialogue in Vulcan to be dubbed over Leonard Nimoy and Kirstie Alley speaking English. Okrand was recruited for the job and remembers driving home from the set one day thinking, “Oh, my God, I just taught Mr. Spock how to speak Vulcan!” Those four lines in Vulcan were to be just the beginning. Two years later, Bennett was working on Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and called upon Okrand’s expertise again. The assignment this time was to create a language for the alien warrior race of Klingons. James Doohan, who played Star Trek’s Scotty, had actually coined a few words of Klingon for the first Star Trek movie. Okrand took the sounds of those words as a starting point and created the language known today as Klingon. On set for the filming of Star Trek III, Okrand had veto power over takes (although he learned to use this power sparingly) if the actors mispronounced their Klingon lines. During this process, the language evolved into a “real” language. After the film, Klingon took on a life of its own. Okrand wrote three books about the language (including the essential Klingon Dictionary), recorded language learning audiotapes, and worked on a CD-ROM game related to learning Klingon. He also shows up from time to time at the Klingon Language Institute’s annual qep'a' In addition to Vulcan and Klingon, Okrand also created the Atlantean language for the 2001 Disney animated feature Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Atlantean is based, in part, on Indo-European roots to give it an ancient quality. Okrand also got to work with Leonard Nimoy again on this project. It is rumored that the character of the linguist in the film, Milo Thatch (voiced by Michael J. Fox), is based on Marc Okrand because the filmmakers didn’t really know what a linguist should look like and decided to use Dr. Okrand as a model.