Health workers in Madhya Pradesh faced losing job if they did not sterilise at least one man
An instruction to male health workers in Madhya Pradesh to convince at least one man to opt for sterilisation or face losing their jobs has been withdrawn after a flurry of criticism.
The order issued on 11 February said health workers had until the end of the current financial year to notch up one sterilisation.
Continue reading...Frontrunner condemns interference and says: ‘Unlike Trump, I do not consider Vladimir Putin a good friend. He is an autocratic thug’
US officials told Bernie Sanders that the Russian government is working to help him secure the Democratic nomination, the Washington Post reported Friday.
And new reports are emerging that Sanders knew a month ago about the interference. Asked why the news is only coming out now, Sanders pointed to the Nevada caucuses and suggested media was to blame.
Sanders tells reporters he learned about Russian interference in his campaign about a month ago.
But asked why it came out now, Sanders points to the fact that the NV caucuses are a day away. And adds sarcastically, "Washington Post? Good friends."
That’s it from me today. My west coast colleague, Mario Koran, will take over the blog for the next few hours.
Here’s where the day stands so far:
Continue reading...The subsistence farmers of the Gongwang Bonyo tribe are among the most isolated people in Myanmar. Living near the Indian border, they gather each year to bless the harvest
Continue reading...For seven decades, India has been held together by its constitution, which promises equality to all. But Narendra Modi’s BJP is remaking the nation into one where some people count as more Indian than others. By Samanth Subramanian
Soon after the violence began, on 5 January, Aamir was standing outside a residence hall in Jawaharlal Nehru University in south Delhi. Aamir, a PhD student, is Muslim, and he asked to be identified only by his first name. He had come to return a book to a classmate when he saw 50 or 60 people approaching the building. They carried metal rods, cricket bats and rocks. One swung a sledgehammer. They were yelling slogans: “Shoot the traitors to the nation!” was a common one. Later, Aamir learned that they had spent the previous half-hour assaulting a gathering of teachers and students down the road. Their faces were masked, but some were still recognisable as members of a Hindu nationalist student group that has become increasingly powerful over the past few years.
The group, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidya Parishad (ABVP), is the youth wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Founded 94 years ago by men who were besotted with Mussolini’s fascists, the RSS is the holding company of Hindu supremacism: of Hindutva, as it’s called. Given its role and its size, it is difficult to find an analogue for the RSS anywhere in the world. In nearly every faith, the source of conservative theology is its hierarchical, centrally organised clergy; that theology is recast into a project of religious statecraft elsewhere, by other parties. Hinduism, though, has no principal church, no single pontiff, nobody to ordain or rule. The RSS has appointed itself as both the arbiter of theological meaning and the architect of a Hindu nation-state. It has at least 4 million volunteers, who swear oaths of allegiance and take part in quasi-military drills.
Continue reading...Injuries and fatalities are common among thousands of debt-bonded men and children toiling in one of the world’s harshest work environments
All photographs by Mashal Baloch
The spectre of death hovers over the coal mines of Balochistan. Under scorching skies, this turbulent south-west region of Pakistan is home to one of the world’s harshest work environments, where tens of thousands of men and children descend below the surface each day to dig up thousands of tonnes of coal.
The threats of underground explosions, methane gas poisoning, suffocation, or mine walls collapsing are omnipresent and there is barely a single worker across the state’s five massive commercial coal mines who has not been touched by the fatalities that are common here.
Continue reading...Raised to hide her low caste, Yashica Dutt’s new book traces her realisation that her history is one of oppression, not shame
Pretending not to be a Dalit took a heavy toll on the young Yashica Dutt.
Her mother, Shashi, was so determined to protect her three children from the discrimination of the Hindu caste system that relegates Dalits to the periphery of society that she pretended the family were Brahmin.
Continue reading...Rules intended to protect domestic workers have only made them more vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, say activists
Amita* knew she had to escape. After five months of being assaulted, starved and being forced to work for 20 hours a day as a domestic maid in a suburban house in Kuwait, the 45-year old from Nepal seized her chance. While the household slept, she climbed out of a downstairs bathroom window and fled.
Amita managed to find the Nepali embassy, hoping that staff there would assure her safety and help send her home to Kathmandu.
Continue reading...Italian couple’s footage against backdrop of Myanmar’s ‘holy land’ provokes outrage
Outrage is growing in Myanmar after the emergence of a 12-minute pornographic video shot in Bagan, the country’s best-known tourist spot and Unesco heritage site featuring thousands of revered Buddhist pagodas.
The video was posted on PornHub by users who described themselves as a 23-year-old Italian couple.
Continue reading...US secretary of state calls for significant drop in violence before formal peace talks can begin
Mike Pompeo has hailed “a pretty important breakthrough” in Afghan peace talks, as officials confirmed that the Taliban had agreed to a partial week-long ceasefire as a precursor to broader peace talks and the withdrawal of at least some US troops.
But the US secretary of state said that Washington still wanted to see a significant reduction in violence before formal negotiations could begin. “If we can get there – if we can hold that posture for a while – then we’ll be able to begin the real, serious discussion which is all the Afghans sitting at a table,” Pompeo said on Thursday.
Continue reading...Creators of Meray Paas Tum Ho could be facing legal suit amid accusations the hugely popular show was ‘misogynistic’
A court in Pakistan has summoned the creators of a wildly popular television series after a petition was filed demanding they apologise for portraying Pakistani women as “greedy, selfish and non-professional”.
In the petition filed at the Sindh high court last month, lawyer Sana Saleem said the television series Meray Paas Tum Ho (I Have You) was “ridiculing a woman who makes the same decision as every other man in society”.
Continue reading...Smugglers responsible for mass atrocities in Thailand may be linked to capsized boat carrying refugees from Bangladesh to Malaysia
Activists fear a dangerous transnational trafficking network is being revived after at least 16 Rohingya refugees drowned in the Bay of Bengal on Tuesday morning.
Bangladeshi officials said a wooden fishing boat carrying about 138 people capsized near Bangladesh’s St Martin’s island in the early hours.
Continue reading...Even for a party known for its openly Hindu nationalist agenda, the campaign has been one of their most brazenly anti-Muslim
Standing before a political rally in Delhi, Yogi Adityanath, the firebrand Hindu nationalist chief minister of Uttar Pradesh known for preaching hate and violence against India’s Muslims, did not mince his words.
The thousands of women who have been gathered for two months in the Delhi suburb of Shaheen Bagh in protest against India’s new citizenship law were “terrorists”, he said.
Continue reading...Officials claim there are no tigers in Goa. But the poisoning of a mother and three cubs has forced the issue into the open
As a child living in the Vagheri hills at the foot of the Western Ghats, Rajendra Kerkar would often hear the majestic roar of tigers echo across the mountains. It was never greeted with fear by the villagers in this remote corner of northern Goa; the name Vagheri translates as “home of the tigers” and coexistence with India’s national animal was part of their way of life.
Yet according to state authorities, these tigers do not exist; or if they do, they are just passing through. Unlike other states in India, where the presence of tigers has been celebrated, embraced and in many cases exploited for tourism, Goa’s tigers have instead been subjected to a strange charade, whereby their existence has repeatedly been denied or covered up by those in government.
Continue reading...Refugees in Cox’s Bazar complain the international aid community does not utilise their experience and say the lack of education risks creating a ‘lost generation’
In a tea room just outside Bangladesh’s Rohingya refugee camps, a group of young activists fiddle with their phones, which have suddenly started pinging in chorus now they are finally reconnected to the internet.
To circumvent a government internet blackout around the camps in Cox’s Bazar, they have to break a ban on travelling to nearby Bangladeshi towns, from where they can communicate and coordinate messages for the international community.
Continue reading...Trial resets traffic lights to red when the noise from car horns goes beyond 85 decibels
There is a truth universally acknowledged by drivers in India: honk your horn loud enough and the traffic lights will surely change to green.
But, fed up of impatient drivers inflicting a deafening roar every time they are forced to stop, police in Mumbai have come up with a new system to punish those who cannot wait at traffic lights in silence.
Continue reading...Women who were forced into sex work are helped to seek justice by a unique scheme that trains them as lawyers
Saira* wants to become a lawyer so she can put her rapists in jail. “I want to fight my own case and put those monsters behind bars,” says the 31-year-old from West Bengal.
She may achieve her objective. In June, after three years of study, Saira will become the first student to graduate from a unique programme that offers survivors of sexual exploitation the chance to enrol in fully funded law courses.
Continue reading...At 73 years old, Mohammad Shoaib had grown used to harassment from police. As one of India’s highest-profile activists, he had made a name fighting for Muslims falsely accused of being terrorists by the police, earning him powerful enemies.
But in late December, as he was brought into the police station in Lucknow, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, in the middle of the night, he felt something had shifted. “Police officers abused me badly while I was in their custody and they threatened me in many ways,” he said. “One [senior officer] said to me at the police station: ‘I will fuck your mother. I am going to throw all your family members in jail where they will rot for life. I will destroy your family’.”
Continue reading...Khalid Mollah died while working among the thousands who dismantle old ships in Chittagong. Now, in a test case that could transform the industry, his widow is suing the firm that sold the vessel for scrap
Khalid Mollah was uneducated, illiterate and out of work when, in early 2009, he left his pregnant wife Hamida Begum to take the 200-mile bus ride to Chittagong from the small village of Gopai, in northern Bangladesh. The young man’s destination was Sitakunda, the notorious, 20km stretch of wide beach and tidal mudflats just north of Bangladesh’s fast-growing second city.
Here, nearly 25,000 people work in dozens of ship-breaking yards, steel-rolling mills and factories to recover and sell on every bit of plate metal, deck, mast, funnel, hatch, gangplank, wire, nut, cable, bolt, wood and rivet that makes up the world’s giant ships.
Continue reading...Suspected Hindu nationalist went live on Facebook before firing on march against new law
A suspected Hindu nationalist went live on Facebook to warn he was taking his “final journey”, minutes before opening fire on university students protesting against India’s new citizenship law.
One student was reportedly shot in the hand before police arrested the alleged gunman, who timed his attack on Thursday to coincide with the anniversary of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 by a Hindu radical.
Continue reading...Government says schools to face more scrutiny after report that thousands may have been victims of paedophile ring
Afghanistan’s attorney general has launched an investigation into the alleged abuse of more than 500 schoolboys, following the discovery of a paedophile ring in the country’s Logar province.
Jamshid Rasooli, a spokesman for the attorney general’s office, said a committee had been appointed. “We are in the process of running a comprehensive, impartial investigation,” he said.
Continue reading...