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Researchers find that in low and middle-income countries owning spectacles can help people over 35 can increase their incomeOwning a pair of reading glasses might help people increase their earnings by a third, according to new research.The study, conducted in Bangladesh, is the first to examine the impact of having a decent pair of spectacles, and researchers found monthly median earnings among one group...

Afghan regime’s return to public stoning and flogging is because there is ‘no one to hold them accountable’ for abuses, say activistsThe Taliban’s announcement that it is resuming publicly stoning women to death has been enabled by the international community’s silence, human rights groups have said.Safia Arefi, a lawyer and head of the Afghan human rights organisation Women’s Window of Hope, said the announcement...

Exclusive: $9bn port, airport and military base on Great Nicobar Island will cause ‘genocide’ of isolated Shompen, academics warnAcademics from around the world have urged India to cancel a huge construction project on Great Nicobar Island, warning it would be “a death sentence” for the Shompen hunter-gatherer people who live there.The $9bn (£7bn) port project, planned to transform the Indian Ocean island of 8,000...

Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing facing criticism after months of battlefield losses, with an estimated two-thirds of the country gripped by conflictThree years after seizing power, Myanmar’s junta is struggling to assert control, with humiliating losses in recent months and growing criticism of its leader, Min Aung Hlaing, by pro-military figures.Images shared across social media show hauls of weapons seized from overrun military outposts...

Police start to interview witnesses following Guardian reports on adoptions to the Netherlands nearly 50 years agoRead more: ‘I was told I could visit. Then she went missing’: the Bangladeshi mothers who say their children were adopted without consentPolice in Bangladesh have launched an investigation into historical allegations that children were adopted abroad without their parents’ consent, after a Guardian investigation into adoptions to...

Girls as young as 16 arrested in shops, classes and markets in Kabul by the Taliban, who labelled them ‘infidels’ for wearing ‘bad hijab’Girls as young as 16 have been arrested across the Afghan capital, Kabul, in the past week for violating the Taliban’s hijab rules.The girls – who were detained in shopping centres, classes and street markets – were accused of “spreading and...

A diplomatic breakthrough has allowed 62 refugees to start a new life in America. Yet a million still remain in fear and poverty in the Bangladeshi campsAfter 23 hours on his first international flight, it was only after stepping off the plane in the United States that Nurul Haque finally felt the relief of escaping the refugee camps of Bangladesh, where he was born.Haque...

There was outrage when the vice-president was mocked last month by an opposition MP, but social commentators say India is increasingly a country that cannot take a jokeIt is rare for India’s politicians to laugh at themselves, but a row over an act of mimicry has exposed the extent of the lack of humour and intolerance of satire in the country’s political and public...