Cash-strapped Sri Lanka announced a two-week halt to all fuel sales except for essential services starting Monday and called for a partial shutdown as its unprecedented economic crisis deepened.. Four out of five people in Sri Lanka have started skipping meals as they cannot afford to eat, the UN has said, warning of a looming "dire humanitarian crisis" with millions in need of aid.
A tornado ripped through a city in the Netherlands Monday, killing at least one person and injuring 10 others in the first fatal twister to hit the country for three decades.. The Netherlands experiences several tornadoes a year but the last fatal one to hit the country was in 1992, the Dutch meteorological agency KNMI said.
Sri Lanka's heavily loss-making state-run electricity monopoly asked for a shocking price rise of over 800 percent for its poorest customers with the bankrupt nation out of fuel, regulators said Monday.. The Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) lost 65 billion rupees ($185 million) in the first quarter and sought an 835 percent price hike for the heavily-subsided smallest power consumers, the Public Utilities Commission of Sri Lanka (PUCSL) said.
During the nine-month trial stemming from France's worst ever terror attacks in November 2015, the moment hundreds of victims were hoping for came late in proceedings.. Those caught up in the carnage of November 13, 2015, had expressed different hopes for the trial, the biggest in French history which comes to climax this Wednesday when verdicts are expected.
A long-delayed conference on how to restore the faltering health of global oceans kicked off in Lisbon on Monday, with the head of the UN saying the world's seas are in crisis.. At the same time, scientists warn, a drastic reduction in greenhouse gases is needed to restore ocean health. mh/gil
Queen Elizabeth II travelled to Scotland on Monday for a week of royal events and took part in a ceremony in Edinburgh, despite question marks over her attendance.. In May, royal officials said the queen would not attend this summer's royal garden parties at Buckingham Palace and at Holyrood.
International and local relief organisations are shifting their focus from the immediate to longer term for areas of Afghanistan hit by last week's killer earthquake, officials said Monday.. While aid and shelter have reached almost all areas affected, the longer-term prospects look bleak and assistance limited in a country already in the grip of a humanitarian crisis made worse since the Taliban's return to power in August.
YouTube has removed a viral music video in India released posthumously by murdered Sikh rapper Sidhu Moose Wala following a complaint by the government.. The track, released posthumously on Thursday, also touches on other sensitive topics such as deadly riots targeting the Sikh community that broke out in India in 1984 and the storming of an important Sikh temple in Amritsar by the army the same year.
President Volodymyr Zelensky will urge world powers to step up their support for Ukraine when he addresses the G7 summit on Monday, as Kyiv reels from the first Russian strikes on the capital in weeks.. Biden condemned the strikes, the first on the Ukrainian capital in almost three weeks, as "barbarism".
Abortion bans enacted across America will be especially painful for women in the US military, one more hurdle they have to face in a man's world where sexual assault and unwanted pregnancies occur more often than in the rest of society.. However, Austin stopped short of announcing any new measures to help the more than 230,000 women serving in the US military, including at large military bases in conservative states such as Texas or Kentucky, which either already have or will soon enact sweeping abortion bans.
