In Kashmir, India batters press freedom and journalists

Kashmiri Journalists work during surprise search of pedestrians by security forces in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, on January 21, 2022. (AP)
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Updated 23 January 2022
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In Kashmir, India batters press freedom and journalists

  • Journalists have long contended with various threats in India-controlled part of Kashmir
  • Situation has gotten dramatically worse since India revoked region’s semi-autonomy in 2019

SRINAGAR: For five years, Sajad Gul wrote about conflict wracking his homeland, a disputed Himalayan territory where a violent armed rebellion and India’s brutal counterinsurgency have raged for over three decades. 
That changed on a snowy Wednesday night in January with a knock at his house. Gul was surrounded by Indian soldiers wielding automatic rifles who bundled him into a vehicle and sped away, plowing through the snow-laden track in Hajjin, a quiet village about 20 miles from Srinagar, the region’s main city, said his mother, Gulshana, who only uses one name. 
Journalists have long contended with various threats in Indian-controlled Kashmir and found themselves caught between warring sides. But their situation has gotten dramatically worse since India revoked the region’s semi-autonomy in 2019, throwing Kashmir under a severe security and communication lockdown and the media in a black hole. A year later, the government’s new media policy sought to control the press more effectively to censure independent reporting. 
Dozens have been arrested, interrogated and investigated under harsh anti-terror laws. Fearing reprisals, local press has largely wilted under pressure. 




Kashmiri Journalists attend a meeting to discuss the shutting of Kashmir Press Club building, the regional s only independent press club, in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, on January 20, 2022. (AP)

“Indian authorities appear determined to prevent journalists from doing their jobs,” said Steven Butler, Asia program coordinator of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. 
Gul’s arrest, which the CPJ condemned, underscored the fast-eroding press freedoms and criminalization of journalists in Kashmir. 
Police told Gul’s family that he was arrested for provoking people to “resort to violence and disturb public peace.” A police statement later described him as “habitual of spreading disinformation” and “false narratives” on social media. 
He was detained days after his single tweet linked a video clip of a protest against Indian rule, following a Kashmiri rebel’s killing. He spent 11 days locked up before a local court granted him bail. 
Instead of freeing Gul, authorities charged him in a new case under the Public Safety Act, which allows officials to imprison anyone for up to two years without trial. 
“My son is not a criminal,” said Gulshana. “He only used to write.” 
Media has always been tightly controlled in India’s part of Muslim-majority Kashmir. Arm twisting and fear have been extensively used to intimidate the press since 1989, when rebels began fighting Indian soldiers in a bid to establish an independent Kashmir or union with Pakistan. Pakistan controls Kashmir’s other part and the two counties fiercely claim the territory in full. 
The fighting has left tens of thousands of people dead. Yet, Kashmir’s diverse media flourished despite relentless pressure from Indian authorities and rebel groups. 
That changed in 2019, when authorities began filing criminal cases against some journalists. Several of them have been forced to reveal their sources, while others have been physically assaulted. 
“Authorities have created a systematic fear and launched a direct assault on free media. There is complete intolerance of even a single critical word,” said Anuradha Bhasin, an editor at Kashmir Times, a prominent English daily that was established in 1954. 
Bhasin was among the few who filed a petition with India’s Supreme Court, resulting in partial restoration of communication services after the 2019 blackout, which the government had said was necessary to stall anti-India protests. 
But she soon found herself in the crosshairs of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government. 




Kashmir Press Club building is pictured through a closed gate after it was sealed by authorities in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, on January 18, 2022. (AP)

Bhasin’s legacy newspaper office in Srinagar, operating from a rented government building, was sealed by authorities without any notice. Its staff was not allowed to take out any equipment. 
“They are killing local media except those who are willing to become government stenographers,” said Bhasin. 
Under Modi, press freedoms in India have steadily shrunk since he was first elected in 2014. Last year, India was ranked 142nd in the global press freedom index by media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, below Afghanistan and Zimbabwe. 
Nowhere has this slide been more glaring than in Kashmir. 
Authorities have pressed newspapers by chastising editors and starving them of advertisement funds, their main source of income, to chill aggressive reporting. 
For the most part, newspapers appear to have cooperated and self-censored stories, afraid to be branded anti-national by a government that equates criticism with secessionism. 
“We have been merely trying to keep afloat and hardly have been able to do proper journalism for various reasons, one being that we are mainly dependent on government ads,” said Sajjad Haider, the top editor of Kashmir Observer. 
There have been press crackdowns in the region before, especially during periods of mass public uprisings. But the ongoing crackdown is notably worse. 
Last week, a few journalists supportive of the Indian government, with assistance from armed police, took control of the Kashmir Valley’s only independent press club. Authorities shut it down a day later, drawing sharp criticism from journalist bodies. 
The Editors Guild of India accused the government of being “brazenly complicit” and dubbed it an “armed takeover.” Reporters Without Borders called it an “undeclared coup” and said the region is “steadily being transformed into a black hole for news and information.” 
The press club is the region’s latest civil society group to face the government’s widening crackdown. In the last two years, authorities have stopped the Kashmir High Court Bar Association and the Kashmir Chamber of Commerce from holding internal elections. 
The government defended its move by citing “potential law and order situation” and “the safety of bona fide journalists.” It said the club failed to register under a new law and hold elections for a new managing body. 
The club said new registration was granted by authorities after “six months of rigorous police verification” in late December, but kept in “abeyance” a day later for unknown reasons. 
The government’s move ran in stark contrast with its policy in the region’s Hindu-dominated Jammu city where another press club continues to function without having held an election for nearly half a decade. 
Majid Maqbool, a local reporter, said the club extended institutional support to journalists working under difficult conditions. “It was like a second home for us,” he said. 
Local Kashmiri reporters were often the only eyes on the ground for global audiences, particularly after New Delhi barred foreign journalists from the region without official approval a few years ago. Most of the coverage has focused on the Kashmir conflict and government crackdowns. Authorities are now seeking to control any narrative seen opposed to the broad consensus in India that the region is an integral part of the country. 
In this battle of narratives, journalists have been berated by authorities for not using the term “terrorists” for separatist rebels. Government communiques mostly appear on front pages and statements from pro-India Kashmiri groups critical of Modi’s policies are barely published. 
Newspaper editorials reflective of the conflict are largely absent. Rare news reports about rights abuses are often dismissed as politically motivated fabrications, emboldening the region’s heavy-handed military and police to muzzle the press. 




Fahad Shah, right, editor-in-chief of Kashmir Wala, works on his computer inside the newsroom at his office in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, on January 21, 2022. (AP)

Some reporters have been subjected to grueling hours of police interrogation, a tactic condemned by the United Nations last year. 
Aakash Hassan, an independent Kashmiri journalist who mainly writes for the international press, said he has been summoned at least seven times by Indian authorities in the last two years. 
Hassan said sometimes officers would question his motives to report and “lecture me about how to do journalism the right way.” 
“It is a way to dissuade us from reporting,” he said, adding that police also questioned his parents several times and probed their finances. 
“Sometimes I wonder if it is worth it to be a journalist in Kashmir,” said Hassan. “But I know, silence doesn’t help.” 


First white South Africans board plane for US under Trump refugee plan

Updated 4 sec ago
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First white South Africans board plane for US under Trump refugee plan

  • Trump’s offer of asylum to white South Africans coincides with heightened racial tensions over land and jobs
  • Trump said descendants of mostly Dutch early settlers, the Afrikaners, were 'victims of unjust racial discrimination'

The first white South Africans granted refugee status under a program initiated by US President Donald Trump boarded a plane to leave from the country’s main international airport in Johannesburg on Sunday.
A queue of white citizens with airport trolleys full of luggage, much of it wrapped in theft-proof cellophane, waited to have their passports stamped, a Reuters reporter saw, before they entered the departure lounge for their charter flight.
“One of the conditions of the permit was to ensure that they were vetted in case one of them has a criminal issue pending,” South African transport department spokesperson Collen Msibi told Reuters, adding that 49 passengers had been cleared.
Journalists were not granted access to those headed to the US Msibi said they were due to fly to Dulles Airport just outside Washington, D.C., and then on to Texas. They had boarded the plane but not yet left as 18:30 GMT.
Trump’s offer of asylum to white South Africans, especially Afrikaners — the group with the longest history in South Africa and who make up the bulk of whites — has been divisive in both countries. In the United States, it comes as the Trump administration has blocked mostly non-white refugee admissions from the rest of the world. In South Africa, it coincides with heightened racial tensions over land and jobs that have dogged domestic politics since the end of white minority rule.
Despite a wider freeze on refugees, Trump called on the US to prioritize resettling Afrikaners, descendants of mostly Dutch early settlers, saying they were “victims of unjust racial discrimination.”
The granting of refugee status to white South Africans — who have remained by far the most privileged race since apartheid ended 30 years ago — has been met with a mixture of alarm and ridicule by South African authorities, who say the Trump administration has waded into a domestic political issue it does not understand.
Three decades since Nelson Mandela ushered democracy into South Africa, the white minority that ruled it has managed to retain most of the wealth that was amassed under colonialism and apartheid. Whites still own three quarters of private land and about 20 times the wealth of the Black majority, according to the Review of Political Economy, an international academic journal. Whites are also the race least affected by joblessness. Yet the claim that minority white South Africans face discrimination from the Black majority has been repeated so often in online chatrooms that is has become orthodoxy for the far right, and has been echoed by Trump’s white South African-born ally Elon Musk.


At least three die, including two children, in Libya-Italy crossing

Updated 29 min 10 sec ago
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At least three die, including two children, in Libya-Italy crossing

  • The migrants were intercepted on Saturday on a rubber boat floating adrift south of the Italian island of Lampedusa that had been spotted by a surveillance aircraft of the EU border agency Frontex

ROME: At least three people have died, including two children aged 3 and 4, in a Mediterranean sea crossing from Libya to Italy, a German sea rescue charity said on Sunday, adding that it had rescued 59 survivors.

The migrants were intercepted on Saturday on a rubber boat floating adrift south of the Italian island of Lampedusa that had been spotted by a surveillance aircraft of the EU border agency Frontex.

“By the time (we) reached the rubber boat at around 4.30pm (1430 GMT), it was too late to help some of the people,” the RESQSHIP charity said in a statement.

“Two bodies of infants aged 3 and 4 were handed over to us,” the charity quoted one of its paramedics identified only as Rania as saying. “They had died the day before, probably of thirst.”

A man was found unconscious and declared dead after attempts to resuscitate him were unsuccessful, RESQSHIP said, adding that it was told by survivors that another migrant had drowned on Friday after going overboard.

Many of the survivors, who were taken to Lampedusa, suffered chemical burns from salt water and fuel, the group said. Two children and four adults in critical condition were handed over to the Italian coast guard to be brought ashore more quickly.

The rubber boat had set off from the port of Zawiya in western Libya on Wednesday, but its engine failed after one day of navigation, leaving the migrants on board exposed to wind and weather, the NGO said.

Lampedusa lies between Tunisia, Malta and the larger Italian island of Sicily and is the first port of call for many migrants seeking to reach the EU from North Africa, in what has become one of the world’s deadliest sea crossings.

Almost 25,000 migrants have died or gone missing on this central Mediterranean route since 2014, according to the International Organization for Migration, including around 1,700 last year and 378 so far this year.


Passenger bus skids off a cliff in Sri Lanka, killing 21

Updated 43 min 47 sec ago
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Passenger bus skids off a cliff in Sri Lanka, killing 21

  • Deadly bus accidents are common in Sri Lanka, especially in the mountainous regions

COLOMBO: A passenger bus skidded off a cliff in Sri Lanka’s tea-growing hill country on Sunday, killing 21 people and injuring at least 14 others, an official said.

The accident occurred in the early hours of Sunday near the town of Kotmale, about 140 kilometers (86 miles) east of Colombo, the capital, in a mountainous area of central Sri Lanka, police said.

Deputy Minister of Transport and Highways Prasanna Gunasena told the media that 21 people died in the accident and 14 others are being treated in hospitals.

Local television showed the bus lying overturned at the bottom of a precipice while workers and others helped remove injured people from the rubble.

The driver was injured and among those admitted to the hospital for treatment. At the time of the accident, nearly 50 people were traveling on the bus.

The bus was operated by a state-run bus company, police said.

Deadly bus accidents are common in Sri Lanka, especially in the mountainous regions, often due to reckless driving and poorly maintained and narrow roads.


Zelensky says he will meet Putin after Trump tells him not to await truce

Updated 11 May 2025
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Zelensky says he will meet Putin after Trump tells him not to await truce

  • Russian president proposed that Ukraine and Russia hold direct talks in Istanbul next Thursday, May 15

KYIV: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he would agree to meet Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin in Turkiye on Thursday after US President Donald Trump told him immediately to accept Putin’s proposal of direct talks.

The Ukrainian leader had responded guardedly earlier on Sunday after the Russian president, in a night-time televised statement that coincided with prime time in the US, proposed that Ukraine and Russia hold direct talks in Istanbul next Thursday, May 15.

It was not clear that Putin had proposed to attend in person, however.

“I will be waiting for Putin in Türkiye on Thursday. Personally. I hope that this time the Russians will not look for excuses,” Zelensky wrote on X.

Putin’s proposal came hours after major European powers demanded on Saturday in Kyiv that Putin agree to an unconditional 30-day ceasefire or face “massive” new sanctions, a position that Trump’s Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg endorsed on Sunday.

Zelensky too had said Ukraine would be ready for talks with Russia, but only after Moscow agreed to the 30-day ceasefire.

But Trump, who has the power to continue or sever Washington’s crucial supply of arms to Ukraine, took a different line.

“President Putin of Russia doesn’t want to have a Cease Fire Agreement with Ukraine, but rather wants to meet on Thursday, in Turkiye, to negotiate a possible end to the BLOODBATH. Ukraine should agree to this, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

“At least they will be able to determine whether or not a deal is possible, and if it is not, European leaders, and the US, will know where everything stands, and can proceed accordingly!“

Putin sent Russia’s armed forces into Ukraine in February 2022, unleashing a conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands of soldiers and triggered the gravest confrontation between Russia and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

With Russian forces grinding forward, the Kremlin chief has offered few, if any, concessions so far.

In his overnight address, he proposed what he said would be “direct negotiations without any preconditions.”

But almost immediately, senior Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters the talks must take into account both an abandoned 2022 draft peace deal and the current situation on the ground.

This language is shorthand for Kyiv agreeing to permanent neutrality in return for a security guarantee and accepting that Russia controls swathes of Ukraine.

Putin also dismissed what he said was an attempt to lay down “ultimatums” in the form of Western European and Ukrainian demands for a ceasefire starting on Monday. His foreign ministry spelled out that talks about the root causes of the conflict must precede discussions of a ceasefire.

Trump, who says he wants to be remembered as a peacemaker and has repeatedly promised to end the war, earlier responded to Putin’s address by saying that this could be “A potentially great day for Russia and Ukraine!.”


Taliban govt suspends chess in Afghanistan over gambling

Updated 11 May 2025
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Taliban govt suspends chess in Afghanistan over gambling

  • Gambling is illegal under the Taliban government’s morality law
  • An Afghani cafe owner said he would respect the suspension but that it would hurt his business and those who enjoyed the game

KABUL: Taliban authorities have barred chess across Afghanistan until further notice over concerns it is a source of gambling, which is illegal under the government’s morality law, a sports official said on Sunday.
The Taliban government has steadily imposed laws and regulations that reflect its austere vision of Islamic law since seizing power in 2021.
“Chess in sharia (Islamic law) is considered a means of gambling,” which is prohibited according to the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice law announced last year, sports directorate spokesperson Atal Mashwani told AFP.
“There are religious considerations regarding the sport of chess,” he said.
“Until these considerations are addressed, the sport of chess is suspended in Afghanistan,” he added.
Mashwani said the national chess federation had not held any official events for around two years and “had some issues on the leadership level.”
Azizullah Gulzada owns a cafe in Kabul that has hosted informal chess competitions in recent years, but denied any gambling took place and noted chess was played in other Muslim-majority countries.
“Many other Islamic countries have players on an international level,” he told AFP.
He said he would respect the suspension but that it would hurt his business and those who enjoyed the game.
“Young people don’t have a lot of activities these days, so many came here everyday,” he told AFP.
“They would have a cup of tea and challenge their friends to a game of chess.”
Afghanistan’s authorities have restricted other sports in recent years and women have been essentially barred from participating in sport altogether in the country.
Last year, the authorities banned free fighting such as mixed martial arts (MMA) in professional competition, saying it was too “violent” and “problematic with respect to sharia.”