It shot to fame towards the close of the war when Mr Wickrematunge was assassinated by men who have never been caught.
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon struck a personal note in his opening remarks, as he recalled his childhood as a displaced person at the close of World War II when his mother, like other women enjoyed little help bringing children into the world.
In many ways, it started immediately, in Leipzig on the close of World War I.
It was April 9, 1945, agonizingly close to the end of the war in Europe.
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Iraq was not even close to the center of the war on terror before the president invaded it.
When the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) swept to power in 2009, ending 54 years of virtual one-party rule, one of its most controversial policy platforms was to establish a friendship with China that balanced the close post-war relationship with America one of the hallmarks of the Liberal Democratic Party's rule.
Here's a look at the precarious balance of power that has kept the Korean Peninsula so close to conflict since the three-year war ended in 1953, and some of the strategic calculus behind why, despite the shrill rhetoric and seemingly reckless saber-rattling, leaders on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone have carefully avoided going back over the brink.
Obama and Karzai, who met a day ahead of Monday's NATO talks on Afghanistan, both agreed that the end of the war was close.
Kibaki is close ally of the US in the war against Islamic terror.
But as the fourth year of the war in Iraq comes to a close, the homeless vet may be someone far younger.
Strangely, it is hard to reconcile the close historical proximity of war with peace.
Germany's jobless total remains stubbornly close to the post war record of five million reached in March.
The EU is already close to a trade war with China, and much of the world, over its proposals to charge foreign airlines for carbon emissions.
Current U.S. spending of 3.8% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on defense programs is astonishingly lower than the 38% spent at the close of WWII, the 11.7% spent during the Korean War, the 9.8% spent at the height of the Vietnam War, or the average of 5.2% spent during the last decade of the Cold War.
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But Americans and Paraguayans alike scoff at claims of a base at Mariscal Estigarribia, close to the Bolivian border (the scene of a 1932-35 war).
Syria was a close ally of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Over the course of the war, Iraq's intelligence service formed a really close relationship with the CIA. This was the CIA of Director William Casey, and there's some evidence that Casey used the Chilean front company to supply cluster bombs to Iraq, which Iraq used to blunt the human wave attacks of the Iranian army.
"The situation on the Korean Peninsula is inching close to a thermonuclear war due to the evermore undisguised hostile actions of the United States and the South Korean puppet warmongers and their moves for a war against" the North, said a statement by the North Korean Asia-Pacific Peace Committee, an organization that deals with regional matters.
Iraq maintains that it no longer has any such programmes, although one senior Iraqi official has all but admitted that the country came close to building an atomic bomb in 1991, at the time of the Gulf war.
From the end of World War II to 2000, the U.S. averaged close to 3.5% annual growth net of inflation.
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Of course, I still have trouble with the current negative real return of the ten-year Treasuries, which are poised to close at the lowest yield since World War II.
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But despite these convulsions, there have been times of close co-operation - in the first Gulf War, in Bosnia and now Afghanistan.
From a peak of 87m in 1995, it is expected to fall to about 52m by 2050, leaving it close to its level at the end of the second world war.
Since the American-led war in Iraq, Washington has been pressing Syria to close the Damascus offices of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and expel their leaders.
Unlike most of the Clintonistas he had seen war up close, observing the desperate, aimless crowds in ruined Japan as a naval ensign in 1945.
The attempts to kill Mr Hussein from the air one that initiated the war, and another that may have helped to precipitate the fall of Baghdad came close enough to succeeding to have restored some of the reputation of America's intelligence agencies.
Not so much because of all the social and technology shifts since then, but because that year is so close to the high-water mark of U.S. predominance as the only great power to come out of World War II more or less intact.
Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith's announcement Wednesday that he would return to private life brings to a close four distinguished, but grueling, years at the forefront of the War on Terror.
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In other words, the war brought with it a GDP increase of close to 75% in just four years!
Only in recent years have we begun to appreciate how close Adolf Hitler came to winning World War II in the spring of 1940.
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