🌏 People In Sri Lanka Protest Economic Crisis, Kenya's First All-Women Motor Rally And More

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People across Sri Lanka have been holding mass protests demanding president Gotabaya Rajapaksa resign over his handling over the country’s worst economic crisis since independence in 1948.

Protests erupted on Mar. 31 over a shortage of essentials such as cooking gas, petrol, electricity and medicines but have since evolved into anti-government protests across the country.

Sri Lanka has been facing an ongoing economic crisis due to years of accumulated foreign debt, compounded by the 2019 Easter bombings and the COVID-19 pandemic, which ravaged the tourism industry, a major source of income for the country.

With barely any foreign currency reserves left, the country is now unable to pay for essential import goods such as food and fuel. It has to repay $4 billion in debt this year, CNN reported.

However, Rajapaksa is still refusing to resign.

Also Happening Around The World

🇺🇦 Russian troops allegedly massacred unarmed civilians in Ukraine’s Bucha leaving dead bodies on the street, prompting global outrage.

🇮🇩 An Indonesian Islamic boarding school principal has been sentenced to death after he raped at least 13 girls and impregnated eight of them over the course of five years.

Breaking barriers in a sport dominated by men, Kenya has held its first all-women motorcar racing competition in the capital city of Nairobi.

The Lionesses Rallying Club, an association inspiring women to break into motorsports, organized the championship at the Moi International Sports Centre Kasarani Rallying Track on March 27.

The race featured eight teams, all crews consisting of women.

Even the marshals, who ensure the safety of the race, were women.

Women are still a minority in motorsports worldwide. Opportunities for women to become mechanics, engineers, and drivers are also limited.

More Women You Should Know About

🇺🇦 Amid Russian shelling, Ukrainian mothers are giving birth in makeshift maternity hospitals in basements.

Pope Francis has issued a historic apology to the Indigenous peoples of Canada for the Catholic Church’s role in residential schools that assimilated Indigenous children.

The schools, established in the 1890s under the leadership of the Roman Catholic church, were part of a Canada-wide network of residential schools set up to forcibly separate indigenous children from their families and assimilate them, according to Reuters.

A six year investigation into the system in 2015 found that it constituted “cultural genocide”. The investigation revealed the physical abuse, rape, malnutrition and other atrocities experienced by at least 150,000 children who attended the schools between the 1840s and the 1990s.

On Friday April 1, Pope Francis apologized for the Catholic Church’s role in the schools after meetings with Canadian Indigenous leaders and survivors of the residential schools who had traveled to the Vatican to press for an apology.

“We feel heard and we feel listened to,” Cassidy Caron, president of the Métis National Council, said. “This opens a door for us to continue on our healing journeys, and it opens a door for us to continue to fight for action.”

More Good News For Your Week

🇭🇺 A referendum in Hungary to ban LGBT content for children has failed after people invalidated their votes.

🇵🇫 A UNESCO-backed scientific research team has discovered and mapped out a massive reef of rare rose-shaped corals off the coast of Tahiti at an unprecedented depth.

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