An event hosted by the global One Billion Rising movement, due to take place this Saturday in New York City, will discuss state and police violence against women in several countries, including Sri Lanka, the US, Somalia, Palestine, India and China.

The discussion, which is co-hosted in Columbia Law School by the African American Policy Forum and the Centre for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at Columbia Law School, will have several prominent academic speakers and will be moderated by Laura Flanders.

Dr Nimmi Gowrinathan, an expert on gender and violence, will lead the discussion on Sri Lanka and state violence against Tamil women.

The capital of Tamil Nadu, Chennai, and other areas in the state have flooded after heavy rainfalls.

The downpour is set to continue for the next 4 days, which is likely to worsen the current situation.

People living on banks of the Adyar river in Chennai were evacuated, according to local officials.

Many Chennai residents used Twitter to provide help and advice to locals and brought awareness of the hardship faced. Many are tweeting their phone numbers and offering shelters in their own homes to those in need, while several others complained about the lack of coverage in national media.

Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena held a meeting with nine senior army officers who lead military operations during the final stages of the armed conflict in 2009, to allay concerns that they be prosecuted for mass atrocities.

The Sunday Times reported that at the meeting, which took place at the Outreach Hotel in Negombo, the military officers explained their role during the final phase of the armed conflict.

Tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were killed during the closing stages, with a UN report released in September outlining reports of violations of international humanitarian law. A subsequent UN Human Rights Council mandated an accountability mechanism to prosecute the perpetrators.

The senior commanders, some of whom are reaching their retirement age of 55, reportedly did not inform the Defence Secretary Karunasena Hettiaratchchi or Army Commander Lt. Gen. Chrisanthe de Silva that they would be meeting the president, breaking Sri Lankan military protocol.

US Ambassador Samantha Power praised the Sri Lankan president’s pledges to reduce his presidential powers as “striking” in an address to the UN Security Council this week.

Speaking on what Ambassador Power called “this desire to extend one’s term or to ignore term limits” in parts of Africa, she drew on her recent visit to Sri Lanka and the North-East of the island.

A Tamil youth has been arrested for photocopying the suicide note of R. Senthuran.

The 23-year-old man from Jaffna, Balendran Prakash, was arrested by Koppay police on Tuesday.

Rajeswaran Senthuran committed suicide last Thursday in protest at the ongoing detention of Tamil political prisoners.

His suicide note, a letter in which the 18-year-old called on the Sri Lankan President to release all Tamil political prisoners with immediate effect, was found in one of his exercise books.