Britain’s retreat from free speech
NEW YORK – The ordeal of David Miranda — the partner of Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald detained at London’s Heathrow Airport, interrogated for nine hours, and forced to surrender his electronic devices (some of which allegedly contained documents leaked to Greenwald by the former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden) — is a shocking demonstration of [...]
A cardio-thoracic project in Jaffna with patients’ best interest at heart
Spotting whom many call “the tallest person in Sri Lanka”, he walks up to him and tells him to hold out his hands, palm downwards, followed by a look into his mouth. After a cursory glance in which he sees “long thinned fingers and a high-arched palate”, he murmurs that 7’3″ tall Kunasingam Kasinthiran has features [...]
Wal-Mart ready to loan $50 million to Bangladesh factories
NEW YORK (REUTERS) – Wal-Mart Stores Inc told investors on Thursday that it could provide up to $50 million in low-interest loans or other types of payments to Bangladesh factory owners for building improvements. The money is part of the more than $100 million in loans and access to capital that a group of North American [...]
Syria expects an attack ‘at any moment’: Security official
DAMASCUS, Aug 31 (AFP) – Syria expects a military attack “at any moment” and is ready to retaliate, an official said today, hours after UN experts probing a suspected gas attack blamed on the regime quit the country. The departure of the inspectors has opened a window for a possible US-led strike after President Barack Obama [...]
Teenager sentenced to three years in Delhi gang-rape case
NEW DELHI, Aug 31 (AFP) -An Indian court sentenced a teenager to three years in a juvenile detention centre today over the fatal gang-rape of a student in New Delhi, a crime that sparked revulsion and angry protests. The juveniles’ court found the teenager guilty over the brutal assault on the student on a moving bus [...]
S.Africa government says Mandela still in hospital
JOHANNESBURG, Aug 31 (AFP) -South Africa’s presidency on Saturday denied reports that Nelson Mandela had been discharged from hospital and had returned to his Johannesburg home. “Madiba is still in hospital in Pretoria, and remains in a critical but stable condition,” President Jacob Zuma’s spokesman said in a statement, denying reports from several news organisations that [...]
Six dead as thousands of Mursi supporters march in Egypt
CAIRO (Reuters) – Thousands of supporters of ousted Islamist president Mohamed Mursi marched through Cairo and cities across Egypt on Friday to demand his reinstatement, in the movement’s biggest show of defiance since hundreds of protesters were killed two weeks ago. Although most marches passed without major incident, a security source said there had been [...]
Buddhist education of women: A feminist perspective
Others too have portrayed her not only as a ‘Sudhu Amma’, but also in terms of her championship of Buddhism, and her dedicated service to education as well as to Sri Lanka. I would, however, like to explore her identity as a woman. As she writes of her arrival in Sri Lanka (I am citing [...]
China to land first probe on moon this year
BEIJING (Reuters) – China will land its first probe on the moon at the end of this year, state media reported on Wednesday, the next step in an ambitious space program which includes eventually building a space station. In 2007, China launched its first moon orbiter, the Chang’e One orbiter, named after a lunar goddess, which [...]
Elite Israeli troops in trouble for dancing at Palestinian wedding
Defence bosses have rapped a group of elite Israeli troops for joining in a wedding party in Hebron while on patrol in the city of Hebron. The troops from the Givati Brigade stumbled across the celebration in the Palestinian city in the southern West Bank and were recorded on a mobile phone joining in with [...]
Waking from the Middle East nightmare
MADRID – The Middle East is caught in a seemingly endless spiral of instability. The possibility of military intervention in Syria, together with the deteriorating situation in Egypt since the army’s coup, has placed the region on a razor’s edge. Moreover, despite the changes in Iran since its presidential election in June, international negotiations over [...]
Syria crisis: It takes more courage to say there is nothing outsiders can do
The urge of much of Britain’s political establishment to attack Syria is in retreat. The prime minister’s eagerness to join an American bombing run on Damascus hit a humiliating reverse in the Commons on Thursday evening. The prime minister now appears to accept there will be no British intervention in Syria. Prior to the vote, [...]
Tarred ‘N Feathered
By now we can only presume that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is used to staring at the abyss. Blase enough, in fact, for a spot of gallows humour. Some of that is surely in order, what with the spooky comedy of errors unfolding around him. Nothing, of course, can relieve his sense of a bad [...]
India seeks allies to defend rupee as growth skids to 4-year low
NEW DELHI (Reuters) – India’s prime minister sought to quell fears of a currency crisis on Friday as economic growth fell to a four-year low, while New Delhi raised prospects of joint intervention with other countries following the rupee’s crash to record lows. The Finance Ministry’s principal economic adviser, Dipak Dasgupta, told Reuters that India [...]
Saudi Arabia passes kingdom’s first domestic abuse law
DUBAI (Reuters) – Saudi Arabia has passed landmark legislation aimed at protecting women, children and domestic workers against domestic abuse, a human rights official said on Thursday, in a move aimed at reducing hidden violence against women in the kingdom. The “Protection from Abuse” law is the first of its kind in the ultra-conservative country, [...]
Japanese mother tells of heartbreak years after North Korea abducted 13-year-old daughter
TOKYO (Reuters) – For two decades after 13-year-old Megumi Yokota vanished on her way home from school one November evening, Japanese police called her parents whenever they found an unidentified body. Unimaginably, the teenager had been abducted and taken to North Korea, her mother told a U.N. Commission of Inquiry panel in Tokyo on Thursday – [...]
Martin Luther King and the race riot that never was
Across America, black fury had broken loose. A swirl of protests, touched off by weeks of racial strife in Birmingham, Alabama, where police dogs had torn at the flesh of protesters and powerful fire hoses had been trained on children, now engulfed much of the country. Between May and late August in 1963, there had [...]
Vast 466-mile-long canyon discovered under Greenland ice sheet
A 466 mile-long chasm on the same scale as parts of the Grand Canyon has been discovered beneath the Greenland ice sheet. The canyon, which is as deep as 800 metres in places, is thought to predate the ice sheet, which has itself been around for millions of years. It has the characteristics of a meandering [...]
Scientists grow “mini human brains” from stem cells
LONDON (Reuters) – Scientists have grown the first mini human brains in a laboratory and say their success could lead to new levels of understanding about the way brains develop and what goes wrong in disorders like schizophrenia and autism. Researchers based in Austria started with human stem cells and created a culture in the lab [...]
Study finds poverty reduces brain power
LONDON (Reuters) – Poverty and the all-consuming fretting that comes with it require so much mental energy that the poor have little brain power left to devote to other areas of life, according to the findings of an international study published on Thursday. The mental strain could be costing poor people up to 13 IQ (intelligence [...]
