Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Lawyers say pair were peacefully protesting against Indian citizenship act
Delhi police have been accused of slapping two Muslim student activists with “bogus” charges of conspiring to incite the recent riots, the worst religious violence in India’s capital for decades, and in which the police were accused of being complicit.
Meeran Haider and Safoora Zargar, students at Delhi’s Muslim-majority Jamia Millia Islamia University, were charged under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, which is usually reserved for terrorist activity and means they can be held for six months.
It wasn’t possible for Mohammed Idrish to watch Narendra Modi’s address to the nation last Tuesday exhorting 1.3 billion Indians to stay at home. His TV was looted along with everything else in his home in Delhi during the recent anti-Muslim riots in the Indian capital.
When Idrish, a carpenter, heard about Modi urging Indians to stay at home to stop coronavirus spreading, he shook his head again and again. “I don’t understand … I don’t understand. Doesn’t he know we have no home?”
My experience on the Sultan’s trail found that two Christians, two Muslims, a Jew and two atheists could live peaceably together, although the mountain scenery seems a lifetime away now
Back in early autumn I went on a pilgrimage from Belgrade to Istanbul with six others to film a television programme that airs on Friday. At the best of times, the mountains of Bulgaria would feel a lifetime away, but now it all feels so much further.
I took part because I enjoy talking about faith, and love walking. Our route was part of the Sultan’s Trail, a long-distance footpath from Vienna to Istanbul. It marks the 16th-century marches taken by Suleiman the Magnificent and his Ottoman armies as they conquered Belgrade and most of Hungary before the Viennese held out against them. The trail is styled the “path of peace”, along which all cultures and religions can come together.
Allegations mount that police in Indian capital incited and aided recent mob violence and failed to help Muslim victims
On one side of the marketplace, it was carnage. As the Hindu mob descended, Muslim-owned stalls selling car parts were slowly reduced to debris and ashes. But just 100 metres away stood two police stations.
As the mob attacks came once, then twice and then a third time in this north-east Delhi neighbourhood, desperate stallholders repeatedly ran to Gokalpuri and Dayalpur police stations crying out for help. But each time they found the gates locked from the inside. For three days, no help came.
The coronavirus pandemic has pushed countries around the world to take stringent measures to prevent the spread of the Covid-19 virus and protect citizens. A muezzin in Kuwait was heard saying 'al-salatu fi buyutikum' or 'pray in your homes' instead of the usual “hayya alas-salah' or 'come to prayer'. Saudi Arabia has banned pilgrimages to the Grand Mosque in Mecca and touching the Ka’bah, the shrine toward which all Muslims face in prayer
All major world religions are limiting large gatherings and physical contact to halt transmission of Covid-19
Events to mark important religious festivals could be cancelled or curtailed in the coming weeks because of the coronavirus crisis.
Next month, most of the world’s major religions have festivals involving large gatherings of people. Easter is on 12 April (a week later for Eastern Orthodox churches); Passover begins on 8 April; Rama Navami, an important Hindu festival, is on 2 April; while the Sikh festival of Vaisakhi is a few days later. The Islamic holy month of Ramadan begins around 23 April.
Police say local MP and news service face lawsuit over report that army’s artillery fire killed two Rohingya women
Myanmar’s police said the army had filed a lawsuit against Reuters news agency and a local lawmaker for criminal defamation, weeks after the military objected to a news story published about the death of two Rohingya Muslim women as a result of shelling in Rakhine state.
After publication, the army said its artillery fire had not killed the women or caused other civilian injuries and blamed insurgents of the Arakan Army (AA), who are fighting for greater autonomy in Rakhine state. The AA denied responsibility and blamed the army. Reporters are banned from the area where the incident happened.
Here are the main points from the press conference held by Boris Johnson. He was joined by Prof Chris Whitty, the government’s chief medical adviser, and Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser.
We are now very close to the time, probably within the next 10 to 14 days, when the modelling would imply we should move to a situation where everybody with even minor respiratory tract infections or a fever should be self-isolating for a period of seven days.
It is absolutely critical in managing the spread of this virus that we take the right decisions at the right time based on the latest and the best evidence, so we mustn’t do things which have no or limited medical benefit, nor things which could turn out actually to be counter-productive.
We were all given an instruction not to shake hands and there’s a good reason for not shaking hands, which is that the behavioural psychologists say that if you don’t shake somebody’s hand then that sends an important message to them about the importance of washing your hands.
So there’s a subliminal cue there to everybody to wash your hands, which is, I think I’m right in saying ... far more important.
What you can’t do is suppress this thing completely, and what you shouldn’t do is suppress it completely because all that happens then is it pops up again later in the year when the NHS is at a more vulnerable stage in the winter and you end up with another problem.
This is what Boris Johnson said at the start of his press conference.
I want to stress the following things. First, we are doing everything we can to combat this outbreak based on the latest scientific and medical advice.
Second, we have a truly brilliant NHS where staff have responded with all the determination, compassion and skill that makes their service so revered across the world and they will continue to have this government’s full support, my support, in tackling this virus on the front line.
Emmanuel Macron invites Christian who spent eight years on death row to live in country
Asia Bibi, the Pakistani Christian woman who spent eight years on death row on blasphemy charges, has filed an initial application for asylum in France and been invited to live in the country by Emmanuel Macron.
But speaking after a meeting with the French president in the Elysée palace on Friday, Bibi said she had not decided where she would settle. She was acquitted last year and granted a one-year leave of stay with her family in Canada.
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.
Schoolgirl Mila received death threats after posting anti-religious diatribe on Instagram
Emmanuel Macron has waded into a row over a schoolgirl whose attack on Islam has divided France, insisting that blasphemy is “no crime”.
The French president defended the teenager, named only as Mila, who received death threats and was forced out of her school after filming an anti-religious diatribe on social media.
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.
Bibi, freed last year and now in Canada, will release her autobiography on Wednesday
Asia Bibi, the Christian woman who spent eight years on death row in Pakistan for blasphemy, has released two photographs taken in exile, as she prepares for the launch of her autobiography on Wednesday.
The former farm labourer, whose case became one of the most high-profile human rights campaigns in the world, was freed last year and flew to Canada, where she was reunited with her family. They are all believed to be living under assumed identities, at a secret location, as they still receive death threats from extremists.
Once a campus fundamentalist who hid his sexuality, today Bagia Arif Saputra helps others find harmony in Indonesia’s capital
When Bagia Arif Saputra was growing up in a university town near Jakarta, becoming a jihadist seemed a natural choice for young men like him, who were steeped in the teachings of Islamic fundamentalism. Less easy was reconciling this identity with his sexuality.
“I was living a double life,” says Saputra. “I would go to the campus mosque, try to focus on my prayers … and find myself checking out a guy and thinking, ‘Nice ass’. And then immediately, ‘Astaghfirullah [God forgive me]!’ So then I would have to redo my prayers. It was a vicious cycle.”
The US president has warned Iran he will obliterate its cultural sites. Here is our guide to the nation’s jewels, from hilltop citadels to a disco-ball mausoleum
If carried out, Donald Trump’s threat to target “cultural sites” in Iran would put him into an axis of architectural evil alongside the Taliban and Isis, both of which have wreaked similar forms of destruction this century. The Taliban dynamited Afghanistan’s sixth-century Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001; Isis has destroyed mosques, shrines and other structures across Iraq and Syria since 2014, some in the ancient city of Palmyra. Not, you might have thought, company the US president would prefer to be associated with.
Does Trump know what would be lost? Probably not – but he’s hardly the only one. The fact that the country is rarely visited by western tourists is not due to a lack of attractions. With a civilisation dating back 5,000 years, and over 20 Unesco world heritage sites, Iran’s cultural heritage is rich and unique, especially its religious architecture, which displays a mastery of geometry, abstract design and pre-industrial engineering practically unparalleled in civilisation. This is is not just Iran’s cultural heritage, it is humanity’s.
Demonstration was organised by umbrella group of Muslim and civil society organisations
More than 100,000 protesters have taken part in a peaceful march in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, chanting slogans against Narendra Modi’s new citizenship law.
The protest, labelled the Million March, was organised by an umbrella group of Muslim and civil society organisations. More than 40% of Hyderabad’s estimated population of nearly 7 million people are Muslims.
Authorities sanction strict Islamic fatwa that forbids boys and girls playing together on stage – but face strong criticism from teachers
Two orchestral concerts by students and graduates of Gaza’s decade-old music conservatory have been cancelled after the Hamas authorities insisted for the first time that they could not go ahead with girls and boys playing together on stage.
The Gaza music school, part of the Palestinian-wide Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, rejected a new single-sex condition which the conductor told the Observer would be a disaster for the 45-member orchestra if sustained by the de facto government.
As the new Citizenship Act risks defining Muslims as ‘infiltrators’, Tushar Arun Gandhi lends support to the backlash
Last week 25,000 protesters gathered in Mewat, in the Indian state of Haryana, to begin the historic five-mile walk to Ghasera village. It was here, 72 years ago, that Mahatma Gandhi made the same journey during the turmoil of partition, visiting the area with the promise of a dignified life for local Muslims.
While millions have retraced Gandhi’s steps before, this time felt different. Against the backdrop of a new Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) passed by the Indian parliament last week, which many believe is openly discriminatory against Muslims and relegates them to second-class citizens, honouring Gandhi’s words of religious harmony and reconciliation felt like a powerful political statement. “Mewat has witnessed many protests, but this is the biggest in our life,” resident Shahzad Khan told local media.
Critics say Narendra Modi’s Citizenship Amendment Act ‘has declared war on Muslims’
Authorities have imposed an emergency law banning large gatherings in parts of India’s capital, Delhi, as nationwide protests escalated, injuring police and demonstrators.
Students have condemned as 'barbaric' the tactics of Delhi police after they stormed a university campus to break up a peaceful protest, injuring dozens. Footage shot by students showed police firing teargas inside a library and beating people with batons. Demonstrators at the predominantly Muslim Jamia Millia Islamia University were protesting against a new law that will fast-track citizenship for migrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan, but excludes Muslims