Category Archives: South and Central Asia

Dozens of children drown in India during Hindu festival

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At least 46 people, most of them children, drowned in the eastern state of Bihar while bathing in rivers swollen by recent floods in observance of Jivitputrika Vrat.

At least 46 people have drowned, most of them children, while bathing in rivers and ponds swollen by recent floods, during the observance of a Hindu religious festival celebrated by millions in India.

The dead include 37 children and seven women who drowned in the eastern state of Bihar in scattered incidents across 15 districts, authorities said on Thursday.

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Pakistan says police orchestrated killing of doctor accused of blasphemy

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Family of Dr Shah Nawaz can file murder charges against police officers over extrajudicial killing, official says

Pakistan’s government has said police orchestrated the killing of a doctor who was in custody having been accused of blasphemy. Officers then lied about the circumstances of his death, claiming he was killed in a shootout between police and armed men, a provincial minister said.

The statement marks the first time the government has accused security forces of what the doctor’s family and rights groups have said amounted to an extrajudicial killing carried out by police.

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Taliban to be taken to international court over gender discrimination

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Afghanistan would have six months to provide response before ICJ would hold hearing

The Taliban are to be taken to the international court of justice for gender discrimination by Canada, Australia, Germany and the Netherlands in a groundbreaking move.

The move announced at the UN general assembly is the first time the ICJ, based in The Hague, has been used by one country to take another to court over gender discrimination.

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Anura Kumara Dissanayake: who is Sri Lanka’s new leftist president?

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JVP leader has positioned himself as opposite to political elites but not all have greeted his win with optimism

As he was sworn in as Sri Lanka’s new president on Monday morning, Anura Kumara Dissanayake heralded a “new era of renaissance” for the country. Many believe Dissanayake’s election marks a significant political pivot for Sri Lanka, which has been ruled by a rotation of the same few parties and families for decades, leading to a continuing economic recession and deep-rooted mistrust of traditional political leaders.

Swathes of the population said it was the promise of change that brought them to vote for the leftist leader for the first time last weekend.

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Sri Lankan leftist candidate Dissanayake claims presidential election

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Second-round victory viewed as widespread rejection of the old political elite amid economic crisis

The Marxist leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake has won Sri Lanka’s presidential election, in what was viewed as a widespread rejection of the old political elite who are blamed for the country’s ongoing economic woes.

For the first time in Sri Lanka’s history, the election went into a runoff on Sunday after no candidate managed to get more than 50% of the votes. However, after second-choice votes were counted, Dissanayake was declared the winner in the evening. “This victory belongs to all of us,” he said, writing on X.

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Police in southern Pakistan shoot dead blasphemy suspect

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Killing comes a week after an officer fatally wounded another suspect held on accusations of blasphemy

Police in southern Pakistan have shot dead a blasphemy suspect during an alleged shootout with armed men, in the second such killing in a week.

Police identified the man as Shah Nawaz, a doctor in the Umerkot district in the southern Sindh province, who had gone into hiding two days ago after being accused of insulting Islam’s prophet Muhammad and sharing blasphemous content on social media.

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British activist denied bail after years in Indian jail without trial

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Jagtar Singh Johal is being arbitrarily detained and targeted for his human rights activism, say campaigners

Delhi’s high court has denied bail to the British activist Jagtar Singh Johal, who has been imprisoned in India for nearly seven years, in seven cases brought against him by the country’s National Investigations Agency.

The ruling has shocked family and supporters who claim it should jolt the British government into recognising that Johal is not receiving justice at the hands of the Indian legal system.

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Taliban’s curbs on women add to risk of polio outbreak, health officials warn

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Regime suspends polio campaign across Afghanistan over security concerns and women’s role in vaccination drive

Afghanistan is at risk of a polio outbreak, health officials have warned, after the Taliban suspended the vaccination campaign over security fears and restrictions on women.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has confirmed 18 new cases of polio infection in the country so far this year, a significant increase from the six cases reported in 2023. Local healthcare workers say these numbers could be higher as many cases will not yet have been detected.

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Climate scientists troubled by damage from floods ravaging central Europe

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Experts unsurprised at intensity of extreme weather but say damage wreaked shows how unprepared world is

Picturesque towns across central Europe are inundated by dirty flood water after heavy weekend rains turned tranquil streams into raging rivers that wreaked havoc on infrastructure.

The floods have killed at least 15 people and destroyed buildings from Austria to Romania. The destruction comes after devastating floods around the world last week when entire villages were submerged in Myanmar and nearly 300 prisoners escape a collapsed jail in Nigeria, where floods have affected more than 1 million people.

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Typhoon Yagi: scores dead from flooding in Myanmar

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At least 320,000 people have been displaced and 64 were still missing after the strongest storm to hit Asia this year

Myanmar’s death toll from floods rose to at least 113, the country’s military government said, following heavy rains brought on by Typhoon Yagi that has caused havoc across parts of Southeast Asia.

At least 320,000 people have been displaced and 64 were still missing, government spokesperson Zaw Min Tun said, according to a late-night bulletin on state-run MRTV.

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Indian opposition leader Arvind Kejriwal released on bail

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Delhi chief minister had been in jail since being arrested in March in corruption case he says is politically motivated

One of India’s most prominent opposition leaders has been granted bail after spending almost six months in jail for a corruption case he alleged was politically motivated.

On Friday, India’s supreme court ruled that, Arvind Kejriwal, who is the chief minister of Delhi, should be immediately released from jail in Delhi, where he has been held since his arrest in March.

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Afghan women meet in Albania in ‘act of defiance’ against Taliban crackdown

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Organisers of international summit hope to create pressure to reverse laws including a ban on women speaking in public

More than 130 Afghan women have gathered in Albania at an All Afghan Women summit, in an attempt to develop a united voice representing the women and girls of Afghanistan in the fight against the ongoing assault on human rights by the Taliban.

Some women who attempted to reach the summit from inside Afghanistan were prevented from travelling, pulled off flights in Pakistan or stopped at borders. Other women have travelled from countries including Iran, Canada, the UK and the US where they are living as refugees.

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Religious groups ‘spending billions to counter gender-equality education’

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Report reveals how US Christians, Catholic schools and Islamists fight sex education, LGBTQ+ and equal rights

Extreme religious groups and political parties are targeting schools around the world as part of a coordinated and well-funded attack on gender equality, according to a new report.

Well-known conservative organisations aim to restrict girls’ access to education, change what is on the curriculum, and influence educational laws and policies, according to Whose Hands on our Education, a report by the Overseas Development Institute.

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Weather tracker: Heat to ease in central and eastern Europe

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Cooler temperatures expected to replace record highs in Estonia, while China braces for Super Typhoon Yagi

Since the start of September, swaths of central and eastern Europe have experienced temperatures well above average, with some places up to 10C (50F) above the seasonal norm.

A date temperature record was set in Estonia on Wednesday, where it hit 29.8C in Haapsalu. The September peak in the country is 30.3C, reached on 1 September 1992.

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Afghan women sing in defiance of Taliban laws silencing their voices

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Women push back at law stating they must not sing or read aloud in public by posting videos of themselves singing

Afghan women, both inside and outside the country, have posted videos of themselves singing in protest against the Taliban’s laws banning women’s voices in public.

Late last month the Taliban published new restrictions aimed, it said, at combating vice and promoting virtue. The 35-article document, which includes a raft of draconian laws, deems women’s voices to be potential instruments of vice and stipulates that women must not sing or read aloud in public, nor let their voices carry beyond the walls of their homes.

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‘Frightening’ Taliban law bans women from speaking in public

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New vice and virtue restrictions offer ‘a distressing vision of Afghanistan’s future’, says UN

New Taliban laws that prohibit women from speaking or showing their faces outside their homes have been condemned by the UN and met with horror by human rights groups.

The Taliban published a host of new “vice and virtue” laws last week, approved by their supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, which state that women must completely veil their bodies – including their faces – in thick clothing at all times in public to avoid leading men into temptation and vice.

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Bangladeshis taking refuge in emergency shelters after heavy flooding

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Nearly 300,000 people forced to flee after monsoon rains, which have killed 42 people in India and Bangladesh

Nearly 300,000 Bangladeshis are taking refuge in emergency shelters from floods that inundated vast areas of the country, disaster officials said.

The floods were triggered by heavy monsoon rains and have killed at least 42 people in Bangladesh and India since the start of the week, many in landslides.

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Modi tells Zelenskiy he is ready to work ‘as a friend’ to bring about peace deal

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Indian PM says he respects and supports ‘sovereignty and territorial integrity’ of Ukraine during historic visit

India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, made a historic visit to Kyiv on Friday and told Volodymyr Zelenskiy he was ready to work “as a friend” to bring about a peace deal that would end Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Modi said he respected and supported Ukraine’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity”. “It is our highest priority,” he said, adding that he had told Vladimir Putin during their meeting in July that “problems cannot be resolved on the battlefield”. The war could only end through “dialogue and diplomacy”, he stressed.

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India should consider ban on microbeads in personal care products, researchers say

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Type of microplastics used in skin exfoliators and banned in UK and US found in 45% of Indian products studied

India should consider a ban on microbeads in personal care products, in line with many other countries in the world, say researchers.

Microbeads are a type of microplastic used in cosmetic products to exfoliate the skin. After a public uproar when the plastics were highlighted in Europe a decade ago, they were banned in the Netherlands in 2014, with many other countries following, including the US in 2015 and the UK in 2018.

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Weather tracker: 10 dead and 34,000 displaced in north-east India floods

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Schools and university shut down in Tripura state after persistent heavy rain, and situation expected to worsen

Incessant rain across Tripura, a state in north-east India, has created what has been described as the state’s worst flood situation in the last three decades. Persistent heavy rain from Monday to Wednesday resulted in several rivers exceeding danger and extreme danger marks, leading to widespread flooding that has caused the deaths of 10 people as well as displacing more than 34,000.

The southern Tripura districts had the worst of the floods and the 34,000 displaced people were being sheltered in the north of the region. There were 24-hour rainfall totals on Wednesday of 375.8mm recorded in Bagafa and 324.4mm in Belonia. The flooding and heavy rain led schools to shut down on Wednesday and Thursday, while Tripura University suspended all regular classes on Wednesday. The heavy rain was caused by a low pressure system situated over Bangladesh that is slowly moving westwards into north-east India. The situation is therefore only expected to worsen, with a further 100-150mm falling through Thursday and Friday as rivers continue to remain at breaking point.

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