Category Archives: South and Central Asia

India criticised over arbitrary travel bans after photojournalist blocked from Pulitzer trip

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Sanna Irshad Mattoo says she was barred from taking a flight to New York where she was scheduled to receive the 2022 Pulitzer Prize

Indian authorities have been criticised after a Kashmiri photojournalist said she was barred from taking a flight to New York where she was scheduled to receive the 2022 Pulitzer prize.

Sanna Irshad Mattoo, 27, was in a team of Reuters photographers who had won a Pulitzer for feature photography for their coverage of the coronavirus crisis in India.

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Eight killed in suspected parcel bomb explosions at Myanmar’s Insein prison

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Three prison staff and five visitors died after the bombs hit a crowd queuing to drop off parcels for inmates at prison housing political detainees

At least eight people have been killed in explosions at Myanmar’s main prison for political detainees after two bombs exploded on Wednesday morning.

Three prison staff and five visitors, including a 10-year-old girl, died after the bombs hit a crowd queueing to drop off parcels for inmates at Insein Prison, junta authorities said in a statement.

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India’s Congress party appoints first non-Gandhi president in 24 years

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Mallikarjun Kharge, a Gandhi loyalist, aims to lead fightback against Narendra Modi’s BJP

India’s Congress party has appointed its first president in 24 years not from the Gandhi dynasty, in an effort to reverse its apparent decline and take on the seemingly invincible Narendra Modi.

Mallikarjun Kharge, 80, a loyalist in the court of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty which rules the party, defeated the rival candidate Shashi Tharoor by almost 7,000 votes in a poll of 9,000 party delegates.

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Tamil refugees on Chagos Islands fear deportation under Rwanda-type plan

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UK government lawyers tell asylum seekers they can return to Sri Lanka or be removed to undisclosed country

Tamil refugees seeking asylum from the British-claimed Chagos Islands face being forcibly removed to a third country under Rwanda-style plans drawn up by the UK government.

Government lawyers have told the asylum seekers that if they cannot be returned to Sri Lanka they will instead be removed to another undisclosed country.

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UN warns against alarmism as world’s population reaches 8bn milestone

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UNFPA head urges countries to focus on helping women, children and marginalised people most vulnerable to demographic change

The world must not engage in “population alarmism” as the number of people living on Earth nears 8 billion, a senior UN official has said.

The global population is projected to reach that milestone on 15 November, with some commentators expressing worries about the impact of the growing number on a world already struggling with huge inequality, the climate crisis, and conflict-fuelled displacement and migration.

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Shehan Karunatilaka wins Booker prize for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

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Judges described the Sri Lankan author’s second novel as a ‘rollercoaster journey through life and death’ and praised its audacity and ambition

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka has won the Booker prize for fiction. The judges praised the “ambition of its scope, and the hilarious audacity of its narrative techniques”.

Karunatilaka’s second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida comes more than a decade after his debut, Chinaman, which was published in 2011. The Booker-winning novel tells the story of the photographer of its title, who in 1990 wakes up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. With no idea who killed him, Maali has seven moons to contact the people he loves most and lead them to a hidden cache of photos of civil war atrocities that will rock Sri Lanka.

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Pakistan summons US envoy over Joe Biden’s ‘most dangerous nation’ remark

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US president questioned country’s nuclear weapons safety protocols sparking outrage in Islamabad

Pakistan on Saturday summoned the US ambassador for an explanation after President Joe Biden described the south Asian country as “one of the most dangerous nations in the world” and questioned its nuclear weapons safety protocols.

Biden made the apparently off-the-cuff remark late on Thursday while talking about US foreign policy during a private Democratic party fundraiser in California, but the White House later published a transcript of his comments, which provoked outrage in Pakistan.

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Aung San Suu Kyi faces total of 26 years in prison after latest corruption sentencing

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Court controlled by junta adds a further three years in jail to raft of other sentences handed to the former leader

A military-controlled court in Myanmar has sentenced ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi to a further three years in jail for corruption, according to reports, meaning she now faces a total of 26 years in prison.

Aung San Suu Kyi has faced a raft of legal cases after the military’s seizure of power in February 2021, from incitement and multiple corruption charges, to illegal possession of walkie-talkies and breaking Covid restrictions.

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Refugee wrongly labelled child murderer says decades of his life wasted

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Mayooran Thangaratnam fled Sri Lanka for the UK in 2003 after brutal murder of his father but was repeatedly refused asylum

A refugee who was wrongly recorded as being a child murderer by the Home Office says delays in his case have led to him wasting almost two decades of his life.

Mayooran Thangaratnam, a 41-year-old Tamil from Sri Lanka, fled to the UK in 2003 at the age of 23 and claimed asylum. He provided evidence to the Home Office from media reports that his father, a journalist who passed information to the UN about the Sri Lankan government’s persecution of Tamils, was murdered by Sri Lankan forces and that his life was also in danger.

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Weather tracker: how record monsoon rain devastated Pakistan

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A heatwave that began in March led to the country receiving almost triple its average rainfall from June to August

Traditionally, the Asian monsoon is a time to celebrate. But after devastating floods in Pakistan, people in the country may feel differently. At their greatest extent in September, floods covered one-third of Pakistan’s surface. About 15% of the population have been displaced or otherwise affected, and an estimated 1,700 have died.

This year’s monsoon was the wettest on record. The numbers are mind-boggling. Between June and August, Pakistan received almost triple its average rainfall. The province of Sindh received more than eight times the usual amount. However, the situation is far more complicated than just extreme downpours.

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Pakistani PM says he should not have to beg for help after catastrophic floods

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Shehbaz Sharif says he wants ‘climate justice’ from rich polluting countries after monsoons put a third of his country under water

Shehbaz Sharif, the prime minister, has said Pakistan should not be forced to go out with a “begging bowl” to rich polluting nations after the floods that have devastated the country and said he would be seeking “climate justice” from the international community.

Speaking from his home in Lahore, Sharif warned that Pakistan is facing an unprecedented crisis of health, food security and internal displacement after the “apocalyptic” monsoons which put a third of Pakistan’s regions under water. Some areas were hit by 1.7m of rainfall, the highest on record.

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Avalanche in Indian Himalayas kills at least four with dozens missing

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Indian air force searches for remainder of group consisting of 34 mountaineering trainees and seven instructors

At least four people died and several others were missing in the Indian Himalayas after a group of 41 mountaineers was hit by an avalanche on Tuesday, the mountaineering institute in northern India said.

The group, consisting of 34 mountaineering trainees and seven instructors, was hit by the avalanche at 8.45am local time, the institute said.

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Pakistan’s PM says rival Imran Khan is ‘biggest liar on earth’

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Exclusive: As economic turmoil continues, Shehbaz Sharif accuses predecessor of leaving the country in ruins

Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, has accused the former premier Imran Khan of being the “the biggest liar on the face of the earth” and injecting poison into society to “dangerously polarise the electorate” after he was toppled from power earlier this year.

Speaking in his first interview from Pakistan since he took over as prime minister in April, Sharif, 70, spoke unsparingly of the “damage” that Khan, the former cricket superstar who ruled Pakistan from 2018, had done to the country in both domestic and foreign affairs.

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Pakistan court drops contempt case against ex-PM Imran Khan

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High court accepts Khan’s apology in ruling that eases the threat of his disqualification from politics

A Pakistani court has accepted an apology tendered by the former prime minister Imran Khan and dropped a contempt of court case against him, his defence lawyer said, a ruling that eases the threat of his disqualification from politics.

The Islamabad high court had deferred Khan’s indictment over the contempt case after he apologised to the court in person late last month.

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US skier Hilaree Nelson given Sherpa cremation after death in Himalayas

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Friends and family fly in and Buddhist monks light pyre at funeral in Nepal of extreme skier

A famed extreme skier from the United States who was killed after falling from one of the world’s tallest mountains was on Sunday given a traditional funeral at a Sherpa cremation ground.

Buddhist monks officiated at a ceremony attended by family, friends and government officials.

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‘These people had our backs’: US veterans lobby to rescue allies trapped in Afghanistan

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The Afghan Adjustment Act would offer permanent resident status to Afghans who fled the Taliban but Congress has not taken action

​​A group of 12 people sit in camp chairs – chatting, smoking, listening – in the dark. Behind them, the Capitol building in Washington DC is luminescent, bringing into focus the Afghan flag. Well, the version of the flag before the Taliban changed it. It flies above their heads, catching the yellowy light of dusk.

Since Kabul fell to the Taliban in August last year, military veterans and organizations have been lobbying Congress to offer Afghan evacuees long-term visas to stay in the US. Now, with no action taken and thousands coming to the end of their temporary stays, a different route is being taken to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act. This bipartisan bill would grant thousands of Afghans permanent status in the US.

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Bollywood under siege as rightwing social media boycotts start to bite

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Laal Singh Chaddha is the latest film to face targeted attacks from anti-Muslim, Hindu-nationalist trolls who some claim are beginning to impact box office performance

In August this year, a week after the release of Laal Singh Chaddha, Bollywood’s adaptation of Forrest Gump, a Twitter account with about 280,000 followers, tweeted: ​​“#Urduwood is trending. Thanks to all who have accepted this term to accurately define the anti-national, anti-Hindu paedophile cabal that takes your money to destroy you.” The tweet received more than 1,700 retweets and about 5,800 likes.

For those not familiar with the term “Urduwood”, it is a pejorative popular among far-right social media and politicians. Urdu is an Indian language with a Perso-Arabic script, and the national language of Pakistan; hence it is associated with Muslims and its use is a way to claim the film industry is “Hinduphobic”.

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Afghanistan blast: 19 killed and dozens wounded at Kabul education centre, say police

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No immediate claim of responsibility for the attack in which suicide bomber detonated explosives, say police

A suicide blast at an education institute in the Afghan capital of Kabul has killed 19 people and wounded 27, police said on Friday.

The explosion happened inside the centre in the Dashti Barchi neighborhood of Kabul, said Khalid Zadran, the Taliban-appointed spokesman for the Kabul police chief.

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Narendra Modi’s BJP bans Indian Islamic group for ‘terrorist’ links

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Popular Front of India, which says it fights for rights of minorities, victim of ‘political vendetta’ by Hindu nationalist government

An Islamic organisation that says it fights discrimination against minorities in India has disbanded after the government declared it and its affiliates unlawful, accusing them of involvement in terrorism.

The government of Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) accused the Popular Front of India (PFI) group of having been involved in “terrorism” and “anti-national activities”.

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Aung San Suu Kyi and Australian adviser handed three years’ jail after secret trial

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Myanmar junta’s sentencing of ousted leader and economic adviser Sean Turnell described as ‘cruel injustice’

Aung San Suu Kyi and the Australian academic Sean Turnell, who served as her adviser, have been sentenced to three years in prison after a closed trial in Myanmar, according to reports.

Turnell, an economist at Sydney’s Macquarie University, was first detained on 6 February last year, a few days after the military ousted Myanmar’s elected government, plunging the country into chaos.

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