Pressure is mounting on Sri Lanka’s president to allow parliament to decide between two men claiming to be the country’s lawful prime minister, amid warnings that the constitutional dispute could lead to a “bloodbath”. President Maithripala Sirisena announced on live TV on Friday that Ranil Wickremesinghe, with whom he had governed in a fragile coalition since 2015, had been dismissed. In… Read more »
Shopkeepers and vendors fear a hefty fine from inspectors who are tasked with keeping the Indian city free of plastic bags Mumbai’s ‘blue squad’ enforce the ban on plastic bags. Photograph: Amrit Dhillon At 10am on a muggy October morning, Crawford Market, one of Mumbai’s oldest, is stirring into life. In a first floor office inside the complex, the feared… Read more »
Relatives help with identification as rescuers say they don’t expect to find survivors from flight JT610 Authorities are conducting a round-the-clock search after the Indonesian Lion Air plane crashed off Jakarta on Monday. Photograph: Xinhua/Barcroft Images A round-the-clock search is underway for the bodies of the 189 passengers onboard Lion Air flight JT 610, which crashed into the sea off Jakarta on… Read more »
Improved train services mean it’s easier than ever to explore Sri Lanka but campaigners warn a surge in tourism could ruin its natural beauty Passenger train crossing the nine arches viaduct near Ella, Sri Lanka. Photograph: Alamy Almost 10 years after the end of its civil war, Sri Lanka has been named the best country in the world to visit… Read more »
This weekend marks the 17th anniversary of the US coalition’s invasion of Afghanistan, triggering a war that has lasted four times as long as the first world war. Some 3,546 Nato soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan, 456 of whom were British, while a conservative estimate suggests 217,000 Afghans have died as a direct result of the fighting. During each of the… Read more »
Seven months ago, 18-year-old Bahara* was imprisoned for failing a test that she should never have had to undergo. Bahara had run away from home to meet a man she had been in a relationship with. They had never met, but were in contact through calls and messages. That night, when they met for the first time, he raped her…. Read more »
India’s supreme court has upheld the legality of the government’s Aadhaar system, the world’s largest biometric database containing the personal information of more than a billion Indians. The five-judge bench of India’s top court decided the benefits of the systemoutweighed the risks to privacy – but pruned back larger ambitions for the scheme by laying down stringent new limits on… Read more »
Nearly two in every five women in the world who kill themselves are Indian, according to a Lancet study published this week that says the country’s suicides rates constitute a public health crisis. The rate of Indian women who die by suicide has fallen since 1990, but not as fast as elsewhere in the world, and now represents 36.6% of… Read more »