Let us be clear. The United States can verify absolutely nothing about the use of chemical weapons (CWs) in Syria. Any suggestion to the contrary is entirely false.

Nirmala Rajasingam, founder of the Sri Lanka Democracy Forum and who is based in the United Kingdom speaks to Newsclick about the challenges faced by the civil society and democracy activists in Sri Lanka. She appeals to the Tamil speaking people in India, the international civil society and the Left in India, to be cognisant of the new challenges faced in post-civil war Sri Lanka, where militarisation, military triumphalism, neoliberalism and Sinhala Buddhist Nationalism have created new discontents apart from the still un-rehabilitated and traumatised Tamil populations - both in the North and the East and in the plantations and the hill country.

Perhaps for the first time since 1947, there is the real possibility of restructuring Indo Pak relations, says Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar. The neighbours see that an end to confrontation will mean valuable benefits to both. In Pakistan, there is recognition that confrontation with India only aggravates its internal problems; in India, there is recognition that confrontation with Pakistan is a threat to secularism, the core which holds the nation together. This is an exceptional moment in history, a moment that must be seized.

As the war in Afghanistan entered its ninth year, the Labor Department recently released new figures for the number of civilian contract workers who have died in war zones since 9/11. Although acknowledged as incomplete, the figures show that at least 1,688 civilians have died and more than 37,000 have reported injuries while working for U.S. contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.