It's just after 6 am on 29 July, and the ordinarily quiet village of Talaimannar, on the small island of Mannar just off the northwest coast of Sri Lanka, is al

Some of the world’s leading tea manufacturers, including Tetley and Lipton, are examining working conditions on the plantations of its Sri Lankan suppliers, following a Guardian investigation. Two global trade-certification schemes, Fairtrade and the Rainforest Alliance, are also conducting inquiries after it was revealed that some workers on 10 certified estates could not afford to eat and were living in squalid conditions. Tea pickers claim that estate owners failed to support them during th

Ramanthan Vijayalakshmi can reel off the date of her brother’s death by memory — Oct. 17, 1995. A 47-year-old resident of Jaffna, Sri Lanka, Vijayalakshmi had lost contact with him five years before he died, when he had been recruited as a fighter by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE, a militant group that had been waging a civil war against the Sri Lankan government to create a separate Tamil homeland, Tamil Eelam. Her brother, Ramalingam Punniyamoorthy, was only in the eighth grad

The smugglers promised that a cruise liner would take them to Canada in comfort. But the MV Lady 3 did not meet such lofty expectations. Rusting and decrepit, the Myanmar-flagged fishing vessel was barely seaworthy, with no sleeping quarters and just two toilets for the 303 largely Tamil men, women and children packed on board. The food was scant — thin porridge or rice, infested with bugs. And the drinking water was the same orange colour as the flaking hull. In 30 days at sea last fall, the

The explosions in 1990 were the start of the second phase of the civil war between the Sri Lankan military and ethnic Tamil separatists that ravaged the island from 1983 to 2009. Almost all of Palaly’s 44,000 residents who were mostly Tamil, either fled or were evacuated by the Sri Lankan government in June and July 1990. For many in Palaly, that was the last time they would set foot on their ancestral land, and for almost all of them, the last time they would see their homes. Shatheeskumar, who

KILINOCHCHI, Oct 26 (Reuters) - (This Oct. 26 story has been corrected to fix name of official to Mahesh Katulanda in paragraph 16 and 20) Arumuga Lakshmi, tormented by questions about the fate of her two children, missing for years, marched through a town in northern Sri Lanka with a group of women, many holding up photographs, black flags and burning torches. During a brutal 26-year civil war between the Sri Lankan government and a militant group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE),

MULLAITIVU, Sri Lanka, Sept 16 (Reuters) - Under a blazing sun, a 44-year-old Tamil labourer tended his rented patch of peanut field in Sri Lanka, striking his spade against the earth in a daily struggle to beat inflation that has put many necessities out of reach. "I have more difficulties than a daily wage labourer," said Singaram Soosaiyamutthu, who moves around on the palms of his hands after an air strike in 2009 took both his legs and injured his left arm. That was during the last stages

(CNN) The southern French port city of Marseille has made headlines in recent months over the deaths of several young people in drug-related shootouts, in what is often referred to as a "settling of scores." A spate of killings this summer, including that of a 14-year-old boy named Rayanne in mid-August, prompted two visits from President Emmanuel Macron in September and October and a promise of billions of euros to tackle the problem.

Schoolteacher Katrina Sam has lived in Lytton in the Canadian province of British Columbia all her life, but a week after a disastrous wildfire, the town she grew up in is almost entirely gone. Lytton itself is a village of just 250 inhabitants, but over 1,000 people live in the surrounding Indigenous reserves, and the population is largely made up of Indigenous Nlaka’pamux people. IR18 – the reserve Sam is from – has been entirely wiped out, save for one fireproof home. On the evening of June

(CNN) Dr. Satyendra Kumar Tiwary thinks of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as superhuman. A leader like Modi comes along "once in 2,500 years," he says, and should be remembered among the greats in India's history, like Mahatma Gandhi, and even the Buddha. "The world will never see another leader like Modi," said the 47-year-old professor of general surgery from Varanasi, which is both Modi's parliamentary constituency and one of the holiest cities for Hindus.

María says she hopes the new law will also result in a wider change of attitude. "My biggest hope is that no more women will have to die [as a result of clandestine abortions], that sex education is taught in every last corner of the country so that women don't have to resort to abortions, and that women will no longer be judged or mistreated by health workers."