Relatives tell of 1,000km bus journeys to Agra where prisoners are held after Modi crackdown
The last time he saw her, Mehraj-ud-din Wani assured his wife that he would soon be a free man.
Wani was speaking to his wife, Gulshan, from behind bars in Srinagar jail in Kashmir. “He was certain that he would be released,” she said. “He said that he will be home in a matter of days.”
Continue reading...Newborn baby girl was heard crying after being buried alive in clay pot in Uttar Pradesh
A man digging a grave in northern India found a newborn girl buried alive, police have said, in the latest case to shine a spotlight on female infanticide in the country.
Hitesh Sirohi had gone to bury his own daughter, who died a few minutes after birth on Wednesday, when his spade hit an earthen pot, local police in Uttar Pradesh state told AFP.
Continue reading...Warning follows another night of violent skirmishes between police and protesters in city
Violent pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong have escalated to a “life-threatening level”, police have said, after a small bomb exploded and a police officer was stabbed in clashes overnight.
Peaceful rallies descended into chaos in the Chinese-ruled city on Sunday with running skirmishes between protesters and police in shopping malls and on streets. Black-clad activists threw 20 petrol bombs at one police station, while others trashed shops and metro stations.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Upmarket brand, which has just launched UN partnership, opens investigation as female labourers in Bangladesh factory say they suffer regular abuse
Lululemon, an athleisure brand whose £88 leggings are worn by celebrities and Instagram influencers, are sourcing clothing from a factory where Bangladeshi female factory workers claim they are beaten and physically assaulted.
The Canadian brand recently launched a partnership with the United Nations to reduce stress levels and promote the mental health of aid workers.
Continue reading...In a country where decades of conflict have taken a profound toll on mental health, professional support is scarce
Human Rights Watch has raised alarms over the lack of mental health support in wartorn Afghanistan, where more than half of the population is experiencing psychological distress.
The advocacy group said that, despite the high prevalence of psychological and mental health conditions, the Afghan government is failing to provide adequate help, with fewer than 10% of the country’s population receiving assistance.
HRW cited a 2018 EU survey that said the overwhelming majority of the country’s population (85%) have seen or been involved in at least one traumatic event in their lives.
Continue reading...Nine children sent to juvenile detention centres as remainder of group face up to two years in prison for failure to produce ID cards
Myanmar faces calls to release 30 Rohingya men, women and children arrested in September while trying to travel from Rakhine state to the city of Yangon.
A total of 21 Rohingya face up to two years in jail under Myanmar’s Residents of Burma Registration Act, which stipulates that citizens must be in possession of “registration cards” to prove their identity.
Continue reading...The country has undergone an economic miracle in recent years, albeit at huge cost to its garment workers. But things are finally starting to improve for them
Tasnia Akter has come home. It’s a public holiday in Bangladesh, the one time of year the 25-year-old can leave the mayhem of the city behind and see her family: her mother, her aunt.
And her daughter.
Continue reading...A scheme training people to host outsiders is creating alternative livelihoods that will help build resilience against climate crisis and stem migration for Indian families
Datta Kondar leads a group of tourists through his village in Maharashtra to view the firefly spectacle for which it is so famous. With the arrival of the monsoons in June, thousands of fireflies emerge at twilight and perform an elaborate courtship ritual, signalling to prospective mates with their glowing bodies in a mesmerising show.
Being a tour guide is not what Kondar, 36, had planned. In 2003, he took the typical route of many rural Indians, travelling to the city in search of work. But he found himself unable to cope with the gritty realities of life in Mumbai and returned to his village, Purushwadi, within a year.
Continue reading...With the country’s major cities set to run out of groundwater in 2020, volunteers are helping to conserve precious supplies
Drenched in perspiration on a muggy Sunday afternoon in New Delhi, Ashia Saifi climbs up and down the stairs of apartment buildings, ringing on doorbells and asking if residents have any leaking taps they want fixed.
Sometimes, the door is slammed shut in her face. People are scared of intruders and strangers, even though Saifi sports a little white cap that’s the emblem of the Aam Aadmi party (Common Man), or AAP, which rules the Indian capital.
Continue reading...Murders took place over 14-year period and each victim ate a meal prepared by the killer
A woman in the southern Indian state of Kerala has confessed to poisoning six members of her family over a 14-year period by adding cyanide to their food.
Police began investigating earlier this year when the brother-in-law of 47-year-old suspect Jolly Thomas became suspicious that she may have forged his parents’ will.
Continue reading...Young people in the global south have been tackling the climate crisis for years. They should be celebrated too
Ridhima Pandey was just nine years old in 2017 when she filed a lawsuit against the Indian government for failing to take action against climate change. Pandey’s fierce, astounding passion for the environment is not accidental. Her mother is a forestry guard and her father an environmental activist; and the whole family was displaced by the Uttarakhand floods of 2013, which claimed hundreds of lives.
In Kenya Kaluki Paul Mutuku has been actively involved in conservation since college, where he was a member of an environmental awareness club, and has been a member of the African Youth Initiative on Climate Change since 2015. Raised in rural Kenya by a single mother, Mutuku’s vigorous activism, like Pandey’s, was inspired by the direct challenges his family (and wider community) faced from the effects of climate change: “Growing up, I witnessed mothers cover kilometres to fetch water,” he says.
Continue reading...Prosecutors say Joshua Boyle, Canadian man on trial for assaulting his wife, advanced a narrative that’s ‘incompatible with reality’
The testimony of Joshua Boyle, the former Afghanistan hostage on trial for assaulting his wife, was intentionally crafted to mislead the court, prosecutors have argued in closing arguments.
Crown lawyers once again took aim at Joshua Boyle’s credibility on Wednesday, suggesting he had manipulated his testimony for self-serving ends.
Continue reading...Google and Facebook told to take down sexual harassment claims against Subodh Gupta
The high court in Delhi has ordered Google and Facebook to remove all anonymous social media posts accusing the artist Subodh Gupta of sexual harassment and ordered Facebook, which owns Instagram, to reveal the identity of the person behind the account that first made the allegations.
Last year, many well-known Indian men, mostly in the film and media industries, had their names mentioned at the height of the #MeToo movement including Gupta, one of India’s leading artists.
Continue reading...The Nepali’s sudden death was attributed to ‘natural causes’ – but like hundreds of other young migrants who die in Qatar each year he worked in extreme temperatures
Revealed: hundreds of migrant workers dying of heat stress in Qatar each year
It is a grim place to die: a bunk bed in a filthy, crowded room, deep within Qatar’s largest labour camp, thousands of miles from home.
As Rupchandra Rumba lay there in the early hours of 23 June, his friends heard him struggle for breath.
Continue reading...Cinema once thrived in Afghanistan until Taliban censorship. Now, new ventures are slowly reviving it
The majority of Kabul’s cinemas cater largely to audiences of young men, and tend to show Bollywood films produced in Pakistan and India. For some young Afghan men, the cinema is a rare occasion for public expressions of joy: audience members cheer on the films’ heroes and sometimes dance along.
For most women, however, fears of harassment in a male-dominated space have made cinemas feel unwelcoming.
Continue reading...Brutal cuts to US-funded reproductive health services threaten to throw progress in the south Asian country into sharp reverse
Devendra Amgai lost his job in November. The 42-year-old public health professional was working in one of Nepal’s more remote districts, distributing contraceptives to women.
The project was proving successful. With little alternative access to medicines or healthcare, local women were seeking out the clinic in ever-increasing numbers.
Continue reading...Bomb wounds 15, despite 70,000 police and troops at polling stations, and turnout set to be low
Afghanistan’s presidential polls have closed amid accusations of fraud and misconduct. Insurgent attacks aimed at disrupting voting in the country’s north and south caused dozens of casualties.
An upsurge in violence in the run-up to the elections, following the collapse of US-Taliban talks to end America’s longest war, had already rattled Afghanistan in the past weeks. Yet many voters yesterday expressed equal frustration over relentless government corruption and widespread chaos at polling stations.
Continue reading...Pakistani court sentences Mohammed Wasim Azeem to life but acquits four others
A Pakistani court has convicted the brother of the social media star Qandeel Baloch of her murder and sentenced him to life in prison.
Baloch, 26, was found strangled in 2016 in her home near the city of Multan. She was killed shortly after posting risque pictures on Facebook of herself with a Muslim cleric, Mufti Abdul Qawi, who was later arrested for his alleged involvement in the murder.
Continue reading...Pakistan PM says he has tried to tell world leaders of growing risk of conflict with India over disputed region
Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, has said he has been trying to raise the alarm at the United Nations this week about the danger of a nuclear war breaking out over Kashmir.
India and Pakistan came close to a conflict in February when India bombed Pakistani territory for the first time in a half century and warplanes from both countries fought a dogfight over the divided region.
Continue reading...A shallow earthquake near Mirpur has struck north-eastern Pakistan, tearing huge cracks in roads
At least 19 people have been killed and 300 injured after a shallow earthquake struck north-eastern Pakistan, tearing car-sized cracks into roads and heavily damaging infrastructure.
The quake sent people in Lahore and Islamabad running into the streets. With rescue operations expected to continue overnight, residents in the worst-hit areas described their horror as walls collapsed and houses fell.
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