A Sri Lankan court on Wednesday handed a six-year jail term to a Buddhist monk accused of inciting violence against Muslims, holding him guilty of contempt just months after he was convicted of intimidating the wife of a missing journalist. The monk, Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara, leads the hardline Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) or “Buddhist Power […]
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Users who publish content freely available on the Internet should get consent from the person behind it, Europe’s top court ruled on Tuesday in a boost to the bloc’s creative industries. Regulators say they lose out because illegal uploads of works on big online platforms such as Google’s YouTube and Vivendi’s video-sharing site Dailymotion deny […]
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Muthuvel Karunanidhi, five-time chief minister of India’s Tamil Nadu state and one of the dominant figures in the politics of southern India for half a century, died on Tuesday at the age of 94. An outspoken atheist in a country where politicians often trumpet their piety, Karunanidhi built his political machine as a crusader for social […]
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The U.S. ambassador joined a ceremony in Nairobi on Tuesday to commemorate 20 years since truck bombs hit the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 258 people and marking the start of al Qaeda’s global campaign of violence. Some 200 Kenyans and Americans, many of them survivors of the attack, gathered at Nairobi’s August […]
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India has asked its telecom operators to find ways of blocking applications such as Facebook and messaging app WhatsApp in the case of misuse, according to a document seen by Reuters. India has in recent months intensified efforts to crack down on mass message forwards after it found that people were using social media and […]
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Brazilian far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro on Sunday tipped as his running mate a controversial retired military general who said last year that a military coup was possible in the country. General Antonio Hamilton Mourão warned last September that the military could seize power if Brazil’s courts do not punish corrupt politicians. Mourão was later […]
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A Japanese medical school deliberately cut women’s entrance test scores for several years, a panel of lawyers hired by the school to investigate the issue said on Tuesday, calling it a “very serious” instance of discrimination. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has made a priority of creating a society “where women can shine”, but women in […]
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Pope Francis recognised on Monday measures that Chile’s bishops said they would take to assist prosecutors investigating allegations of sex abuse that have plagued the Roman Catholic Church in Chile, including that they would work to reach an agreement with prosecutors on an exchange of information. The pontiff wrote in a letter released to media […]
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The deputy leader of Britain’s opposition Labour Party increased pressure on its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, over anti-Semitism on Sunday, saying the party could “disappear into a vortex of eternal shame” unless he tackled a growing crisis. Corbyn has been criticised by Jewish groups for what they describe as his tolerance of anti-Semitism in Labour, a […]
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Saudi Arabia has agreed to admit an Iranian diplomat to head an office representing Iranian interests in the kingdom, the official Iranian news agency IRNA reported on Sunday, in a rare move after the rivals broke off relations in 2016. “An informed diplomatic source said Sunday that Saudi Arabia had agreed to grant a visa […]
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