Critics say supreme court ruling constitutes ‘mass eviction in name of conservation’
Millions of Indians face eviction after the country’s supreme court ruled that indigenous people illegally living on forest land should move.
Campaigners for the rights of tribal and forest-dwelling people have called the court’s decision on Wednesday “an unprecedented disaster” and “the biggest mass eviction in the name of conservation, ever”.
Continue reading...Police warn death toll may rise in ‘highly combustable’ blaze in old part of Bangladesh capital
At least 69 people have died in a huge fire that tore through apartment buildings also used as chemical warehouses in an old part of the Bangladeshi capita.
Dozens of people were trapped in the buildings, unable to escape onto narrow streets clogged with traffic, as the highly-combustible stores of chemicals, body sprays and plastic granules erupted in flames.
Continue reading...Campaigners say resurgence of deadly virus threatens despite huge successes of vaccination drive
The unmonitored movement of people across the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan threatens efforts to eradicate polio from the two countries, as the year’s first cases of the virus are recorded in the volatile region.
The Global Polio Eradication Initiative said people travelling through unchecked crossings is believed to be one of the main causes of the spread of the disease in the area.
Continue reading...Elin Ersson received a £250 fine for refusing to take her seat on a plane in Sweden last year
A Swedish student who livestreamed her protest against the deportation of an Afghan asylum seeker last year has been found guilty of violating Sweden’s aviation laws and fined £250.
Elin Ersson, 22, avoided a prison sentence at the Gothenburg district court, where she was sentenced to a fine of 3,000 Swedish krona.
Continue reading...Indian soldiers and militants killed in hunt for perpetrators of paramilitary convoy attack
Four Indian soldiers and two militants have been killed in clashes in disputed Kashmir as security personnel hunt for members of an insurgent group that killed at least 40 paramilitaries last week.
Police said they were fired on by militants as they searched a village in Kashmir’s southern Pulwama district, close to where a car laden with explosives rammed a paramilitary convoy on Thursday.
Continue reading...Government places tariff on imports while revenge attacks against Kashmiris have been reported
India has announced reprisals against Pakistan for a suicide bombing that killed at least 40 paramilitaries in the disputed region of Kashmir.
India’s finance minister, Arun Jaitley, has placed a 200% tariff on Pakistani imports and the home ministry announced on Sunday it was withdrawing the security details of a several Kashmiri separatist leaders.
Continue reading...Campaigners demand external investigation after human rights organisation dismisses their claims
Prominent Indian rights activists have withdrawn their support for Amnesty India amid allegations of caste discrimination and harassment within the organisation, the Guardian has learned.
The allegations include claims that staff were humiliated, ill-treated and discriminated against because of their caste, a system of social hierarchy among Hindus.
Continue reading...Sanjoy Sachdev helped scores of Indian couples marry across cultural lines, and against family wishes – but police are asking if he was a fraud
It was a world-famous charity dedicated to rescuing star-crossed Indian lovers. For the past nine years, using a network of secret safe-houses across India, Love Commandos sheltered thousands of young people seeking to marry outside their caste, religion or clan – and who feared their families might kill them for it.
Sanjoy Sachdev, the organisation’s chairman, became one of India’s most celebrated activists. Bollywood star Aamir Khan interviewed him on television. International clothing brand Bjorn Borg raised money for his group. Filmmakers and journalists found the craggy, chain-smoking activist who could quote Robert Frost irresistible.
Continue reading...First suicide car bombing in disputed region in nearly 20 years leaves more than 30 dead
Dozens of Indian paramilitaries have been killed in the first suicide car bombing in the disputed region of Kashmir in nearly two decades.
A lone militant is believed to have driven a vehicle laden with explosives close to a central reserve police force (CRPF) convoy and detonated it just after 3pm on Thursday on a busy highway outside the state capital of Srinagar.
Continue reading...Death penalties to resume as part of Philippines-inspired campaign to be tough on drug crime
Sri Lankan prison authorities are recruiting two hangmen after the president pledged to end a 43-year moratorium on capital punishment and execute condemned drug traffickers amid alarm over drug-related crime.
Interviews of the candidates will be conducted next month and two will be hired, prison department spokesman Thushara Upuldeniya said Wednesday.
Continue reading...Judges have moved to ensure that women driven by revenge and self-interest will no longer be able to make spurious allegations when relationships end
Their romance began at work. She asked him out for coffee with her friends. He took her out for lunch. Dinners and walks in New Delhi’s Lodhi Gardens followed. Then, for 18 months, they were in a sexual relationship.
But last year, when Pavan Gupta* turned 24, his parents began pressuring him to marry. When they introduced him to a girl he liked, Gupta ended his relationship with his girlfriend, Geeta Jain, telling her he could not disappoint his parents. “I liked her but I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with her. I always told her I was an only child and would have to go along with my parents’ choice,” says Gupta.
Continue reading...Labourer whose blasphemy death sentence was overturned has been transferred to Karachi
Pakistani authorities have moved Asia Bibi, a Christian woman recently acquitted of blasphemy charges, to a new “secure area” and are barring her from leaving the country, a close friend and rights campaigner has claimed.
Bibi, who spent eight years on death row, was transferred from a location near the capital to a house in the southern port city of Karachi, her friend Aman Ullah told the Associated Press. She and her husband are locked in a single room in a house where the door opens only “at food times”, he added.
Continue reading...Police arrest eight suspected bootleggers after victims in poor Indian villages drank alcohol containing toxic methanol
Thirty-nine people have died in northern India and more than two dozen others have fallen sick after drinking bootleg liquor containing toxic methanol .
Related: India: eleven die after eating 'toxic' rice at temple
Continue reading...A checkpoint along the Nepal-India border has become has one of the world’s busiest human trafficking routes. Now it is being policed by survivors who try to spot other potential victims
It is midday in Bhairchawa, one of the 23 official border checkpoints between Nepal and India. Each day, up to 100,000 people cross under the stone arch separating the two countries. Some are on foot, others in trucks or on bikes, mopeds and rickshaws. Amid the chaos – the people, the dust, the noise of traffic and honking of horns – are the guardians: women who, having survived the horrors of human trafficking, now spend every day trying to spot potential victims and their exploiters among the crowds.
One of the women on duty today is Pema. While we talk, her eyes remain fixed on the crowds, scanning the throngs of people moving slowly across the checkpoint.
Continue reading...Hope is real after landmark Taliban talks, but fears remain about what might happen if US troops depart
The start of 2019 has brought for Afghanistan a tantalising hope of peace, fragile but very real, as the Taliban sat down for talks first with Americans in Qatar and this week with senior members of the Afghan elite in Moscow.
These discussions come fraught with fears, that the progress for women and civil rights will be traded away too easily, and that the Taliban may renege on any deal once US troops and their coercive power are gone.
Continue reading...Thanks to the Kazakhstan city’s loss of capital status in the 90s, rare mosaics, sgraffiti and other artworks escaped destruction
When Jama Nurkalieva and a small group of colleagues conducted a site survey of a disused Soviet-era panoramic cinema in Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan, they had no idea what lay behind the internal plasterboard wall that faces out towards the street – until someone spotted a narrow gap.
As the caretaker shined a light into the darkness behind, the group caught a glimpse of a man’s head. Out came the toolbox and the rest of the artwork was slowly revealed: a Soviet-era sgraffito by the graphic artist Eugeny Sidorkin that had been lost and forgotten for decades.
Continue reading...Smoke inhalation thought to have killed 21-year-old exiled during menstruation despite ban on custom
A 21-year-old woman has been become the fourth person known to have died this year as a result of the illegal practice of chhaupadi, whereby menstruating women in Nepal are banished from their homes and forced to sleep in huts.
Parbati Bogati, from the western Doti district, is thought to have died from smoke inhalation while sleeping in a small, windowless hut. She was discovered by her mother-in-law on Thursday morning.
Continue reading...Hollywood star meets refugees in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district where 740,000 Rohingya have fled since August 2017
Angelina Jolie has shared the stories of rape survivors during a visit to Rohingya refugee camps and said the responsibility to let them return “lies squarely with the government and the authorities in Myanmar”.
The envoy for the UN refugee agency said Myanmar must “show genuine commitment” to end violence that has driven hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims into neighbouring Bangladesh.
Continue reading...The next 15 megacities #14: Surat’s battle to hold back water has raged since its first flood wall in 1664. As its population soars, India’s ‘diamond city’ needs new solutions
Look up as you walk around Surat and you might spot “HFL 8.8.2006” daubed in red paint on a wall above your head. HFL stands for “high flood level”, and the inscriptions are 15 feet above the ground in places – a fading memory of the devastating floods of August 2006, which killed 150 people, according to official estimates (unofficial counts put the death toll at over 500). More than 60% of the city was underwater and damage was estimated at $2bn.
Surat’s geography – it lies at the mouth of the Tapi river, near the Arabian Sea – makes it prone to flooding, and it experiences a major inundation every four years on average.
Continue reading...Monday was Mauni Amavasya, the new moon day and most significant bathing day, particularly if it falls on a Monday. At the Hindu festival pilgrims bathe in the confluence of three sacred rivers to cleanse them of sin and liberate them from the cycle of life, death and rebirth
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