Infinity Social Updates

Sri Lanka’s top court on Friday halted a government move to acquire land in northern regions still reeling from the consequences of a decades-long civil war, 16 years after it ended. Sri Lanka’s north bore the brunt of the conflict in the 37-year-long Tamil separatist war, which was brought to a bloody conclusion in May 2009. Many among the Tamil minority lost their land title deeds during the years of displacement, and the area was also hit by the 2004 Asian tsunami. The Supreme Court order concerning nearly 6,000 acres of land came a day after UN human rights chief Volker Turk ended a three-day visit, during which he urged the authorities to return private lands still occupied by troops. The UN estimates that at least 100,000 people died in the war, with 40,000 of them from the Tamil minority killed by troops in the final months of the conflict. Turk also asked Sri Lanka to investigate allegations of war crimes and punish the perpetrators. Successive Sri Lankan governments hav...

Anti-Muslim online posts targeting New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani have surged since his Democratic primary upset this week, including death threats and comments comparing his candidacy to the September 11, 2001 attacks, advocates said on Friday. There were at least 127 violent hate-related reports mentioning Mamdani or his campaign in the day after polls closed, said CAIR Action, an arm of the Council on American Islamic Relations advocacy group, which logs such incidents. That marks a five-fold increase over a daily average of such reports tracked earlier this month, CAIR Action said in a statement. Overall, it noted about 6,200 online posts that mentioned some form of Islamophobic slur or hostility in that day long time-frame. Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist and a 33-year-old state lawmaker, declared victory in Tuesday’s primary after former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo conceded defeat. Born in Uganda to Indian parents, Mamdani would be the cit...

A poliovirus case has been confirmed in Khyber Pukhtunkhwa’s Tank district, marking the seventh case from KP this year and bringing the total countrywide tally to 13, the Regional Reference Laboratory for Polio Eradication at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) said in a press release on Friday. Pakistan is one of the last two countries in the world, alongside Afghanistan, where polio remains endemic. Despite global efforts to eradicate the virus, challenges such as security issues, vaccine hesitancy, and misinformation have slowed progress. This year, Pakistan has undertaken three nationwide Polio campaigns so far — in February, April, and May. Polio eradication efforts in Pakistan routinely face security issues. According to the press release, the case was detected in an 18-month-old child from the Union Council Amakhel in KP’s Tank district. “With this latest detection, the total number of polio cases in Pakistan in 2025 has reached 13, including seven from Khyber Pakhtunkhw...

The Ministry of Interior on Thursday announced that it planned to take strict action against elements spreading religious hate on social media as part of a security plan ahead of the month of Muharram. The government has ramped up security efforts in the past few weeks as the first month of the Islamic calendar inches closer. KP and the Punjab government have planned to impose Section 144 across the province from Muharram 1 to 10, barring public gatherings, protests, or other actions that might disrupt peace. The central Ruet-e-Hilal committee is set to meet today for the sighting of the moon for Muharram. According to a statement from the ministry today, Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi chaired a meeting aimed at reviewing the security plan for the month. “It was decided that action will be taken against elements inciting religious hatred on social media in light of Muharram,” it said. “In this regard, PEMRA (Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority) has been instructed to m...

Efforts are underway to reconstruct the sequence of events leading to the Air India plane crash this month that killed 260 people, and identify contributing factors, India’s civil aviation ministry said on Thursday. The London-bound Boeing 787 Dreamliner crashed moments after takeoff from India’s Ahmedabad city on June 12, killing 241 of the 242 people on board and the rest on ground in the world’s worst aviation disaster in a decade. The black boxes of the plane — the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and flight data recorder (FDR) — were recovered in the days that followed, one from the rooftop of a building at the crash site on June 13, and the other from the debris on June 16. They were transported to national capital Delhi on Tuesday, where a team led by India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau began extracting their data, the ministry said in a statement. “The Crash Protection Module (CPM) from the front black box was safely retrieved, and […] the memory module was succe...

Life-saving childhood vaccination coverage has stalled in recent decades, leaving millions of children at risk for deadly diseases with Pakistan having the highest number of children with zero doses in South Asia after India, according to a new study by British medical journal Lancet . The Lancet is a 200-year-old peer-reviewed weekly medical journal from the United Kingdom. Since its launch, the journal has expanded into a family of more than 20 speciality journals and has set up several global Lancet Commissions on various important issues in medicine and healthcare. In a press release issued a day ago, the journal said that since its inception in 1974, the World Health Organisation’s Essential Programme on Immunisation (EPI) achieved “unprecedented progress”, averting the deaths of an estimated 154 million children worldwide through routine childhood vaccination. However, it said that as per a major new analysis from the Global Burden of Disease Study Vaccine Coverage Collabora...

United States President Donald Trump struck a conciliatory tone towards Nato allies on Wednesday, framing an expected deal on increased defence spending as a “great victory for everyone” at their summit. Everything has been carefully choreographed at the gathering in The Hague to keep the volatile US president on board: from chopping back the official part of the meeting to putting him up overnight in the royal palace. The strategy seemed to be working — for now — with Trump seeming keen to share the plaudits for a deal set to see the 32 countries commit to spending 5 per cent of output on defence by 2035. “It’s a great victory for everybody, I think, and we will be equalised very shortly, and that’s the way it has to be,” said Trump, as European allies seek to catch up with US spending on defence. “I’ve been asking them to go up to 5pc for a number of years, and they’re going up to 5pc … I think that’s going to be very big news,” he said. Hosting the meeting, Nato Secretary Gene...