Sri Lanka Easter bombings: news and updates

Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa resigned Thursday by email, after a herculean people-power movement fueled by anger over corruption and massive inflation toppled his government. Although it’s a major victory for Sri Lankan activists, Rajapaksa’s resignation raises existential questions about how the country’s political structure, economy, and the protest movement that brought him down will forge ahead.

Gotabaya fled the country earlier this week, reportedly heading first to the Maldives, then on Thursday boarding a Saudi Arabian Airlines flight to Singapore, flight tracking data shows. His resignation has been a key demand of protesters, but it’s far from the political overhaul many see as critical to getting the country functional again.

For the better part of two decades, philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris has been a popular — and controversial — critic of organized religion, and in particular Islam. In a new episode of Recode Decode with Kara Swisher, he said that although he disavows anyone in his audience who would use his work as justification for bigotry, he still believes that we need to have a tough conversation about violent jihadism and a “culture of acceptance” from regular Muslims.

“Islam has problems and points of conflict with modernity and secular culture and civil society, and a value like free speech that Mormonism doesn’t have, or the Anglican Communion doesn’t have, or Scientology,” Harris said, adding, “All the beliefs around martyrdom explain the character of Muslim violence we’re seeing throughout the world. And if they had different doctrines, they would behave differently.

Over 300 people were killed and around 500 others were injured in eight coordinated attacks on churches and hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday.

The death toll continues to rise, with at least 321 people dead as of Tuesday morning, according to the state minister of defense. Among the deceased were 39 tourists, including American citizens.

On Easter Sunday, a series of coordinated bomb attacks killed nearly 300 people in Sri Lanka. It was an unhappy reminder for many of the country’s recent history of violence — a history which Sri Lankans hoped had been put to rest.

The island nation of 22 million just off India’s southeastern tip has dealt with brutal fighting and bloodshed for decades, mainly due to a civil war that pitted the Sinhalese Buddhist government against militant fighters and separatists from the minority Tamil community who pioneered modern-day suicide attacks.

On Easter Sunday, one of the holiest of Christian holidays, a series of coordinated suicide bomb attacks targeting churches and hotels swept across the island nation of Sri Lanka.

By the time the smoke cleared, more than 300 people had died, and hundreds more had been injured.