SRI LANKA: Former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa is accused in a report published today of tampering with police records in a bid to hamper investigations into mass graves discovered in an area where he was a military officer during an insurrection in 1989.

The report by activist groups including the International Truth and Justice Project, Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka and Families of the Disappeared also said that even though hundreds of sets of remains have been unearthed in some 20 exhumations of mass graves in the past three decades, no action has been taken to identify the victims and return their remains to their families.

GERMANY: A rail workers’ union said today that it will ask its members to vote on all-out strike action after long-running pay talks with the main national train operator broke down.

The EVG union has already staged hours-long or one-day “warning strikes,” a common tactic in German wage negotiations, during the dispute with with state-owned Deutsche Bahn.

AFGHANISTAN: The country’s United Nations envoy warned the Taliban on Wednesday that international recognition as the legitimate government will remain “nearly impossible” unless the Islamist movement lifts severe restrictions on women and girls’ education and employment.

Roza Otunbayeva told the UN security council that the Taliban “act against the key values expressed in the United Nations charter.”

RUSSIA: Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested in March, must remain in jail on espionage charges until at least late August, a Moscow court ruled today, rejecting the US journalist’s request for release.