Alakhpura, India – It’s 2:30pm and a road in Alakhpura, a village in Haryana state nestled between cotton and wheat fields, is abuzz with dozens of girls, some on bicycles, on their way to a football field next to the only school.

The all-girl Alakhpura FC team, funded by contributions from villagers, practise playing football twice a day – at 5:30am before school starts and after classes end.

“There is no let off here,” says the team’s coach, 37-year-old Sonika Bijaria. “We practise twice every day, even on Sundays. And every member of the village makes sure we have things we need in place.”

Bijaria puts the players through their paces and picks her best 11 for the game.

The opponents are expected to arrive at any moment. Just as everything is set, the away team’s bus breaks down. They won’t be able to make it.

Instead of giving her players the day off, Bijaria gets the boys’ football team from the school to give the girls the game they had prepared for.

Alakhpura, a village of about 2,000 people, has become a hub of young and promising female footballers, many of whom have represented the state and the country.

The footballing revolution has helped Alakhpura form its own identity, different from the rest of the state. Haryana has the worst gender ratio in India and crimes against women are rising.

Last year, the Alakhpura villagers officially registered the team with the All India Football Federation. They also crowdsourced funds among themselves to cover the team’s expenses.

Sanjay Singh, Alakhpura FC’s secretary, says whenever the team needs financial support, the entire village comes forward. 

“Some will give 100 rupees ($1.35), others may give 5,000 rupees ($68) depending on what they have. We want our girls to play. After all, they have made us all proud.

“We have divided the responsibilities of the club among some of the villagers, but every single person comes forward we need them.”

The teammates first caught attention when they won the national inter-school competition Subroto Cup in 2014. In 2016, they won the trophy again and in 2017, reached the semi-final of the Indian Women’s League.

Currently, nine Alakhpura FC players are also on the Haryana state women’s team. A dozen others have represented India at international tournaments.

“When the state team selection take place most of the players are from Alakhpura. This makes others jealous,” says Tamana, who plays in the state’s under-19 team.

Satbeer Singh is a wheat farmer and the proud father of 17-year-old Ritu and Nishu, 19, who are in the Haryana squad.

But before the Alkapura team’s success, Singh says, parents would hesitate to let their daughters out of the house alone. 

“It was seen as a bad thing if your daughters were seen loitering around in the streets,” he said.

The beginnings of Alakhpura FC

Goverdan Das, a former sports teacher at the village school, laid the foundations for Alakhpura FC in 2008. 

“When we started, I couldn’t have imagined our players would achieve this level of success without proper infrastructure or training,” he said.

Das used to train male pupils. But one day, a few girls approached him and asked for something to do. He turned them away.

“Girls playing was seen as a negative thing. So, I just wanted to stay away from it,” he said.

But the girls were persistent. Every day for two weeks, they approached him with the same request.

Das finally caved in and handed them an old football. However, he still didn’t want to coach them.

“For the next 18 months, I stayed away from them. But the girls would come on their own every day and start playing. I noticed there were improving much faster than the boys’ Kabaddi team, and I thought to myself, ‘Why am I not giving them the same education as the boys?’ This is my job after all,” he recalls.

After a change of heart, Das took the girls to an inter-district schools’ competition in 2008, where they were knocked out in the first round. 

After a year of training under Das, the team won the competition. 

“I have never played professional football, so I wasn’t good at the technical part, but I taught them the importance of hard work and discipline,” says Das.

“If some parents said ‘no’, I would take my daughter there and explain to them that there is no shame attached to women playing. And in fact, they should take pride in what their daughter could achieve.”

If you go to any house in the village right now, you won’t find a single girl at home. Their parents now push them to play.

Sonika Bijaria, Alakhpura FC coach

When the team had to travel outside the state, Das would take the village chief to assure parents. Later on, his wife would also accompany him.

Das says it was important to make parents feel comfortable and bring more girls to the playground.

Today, coach Bijaria says, every parent wants their daughter to be selected for the Indian team. 

“If you go to any house in the village right now, you won’t find a single girl at home. Their parents now push them to play.”

Midfielder Poonam, 16, and her sister Priyanka, 14, are one of three pairs of siblings recently awarded with a monthly scholarship of 2,000 rupees ($26.96) by the government for achievements in inter-school competitions. 

The occasionally watch international teams like Juventus FC on the TV. But their footballing idol is much closer to home – Alakhpura FC’s 20-year-old Sanju Yadav.

Yadav who started playing football in 2010, has played for the national team eight times and scored three goals in those games. “Sanju didi got a job. She also travels around the world with the team. I also want to be like that,” says Poonam, “So, we practise every day to get better.”

Researchers from investigative collective Bellingcat claim they have identified the second suspect involved in the Skripal poisoning case.

Bellingcat, who worked with Russian news organisation The Insider, identified the man as Alexander Mishkin, a doctor working for the Russian GRU intelligence service.

Together with another suspect, earlier identified by Bellingcat to be Anatoliy Chepiga, Mishkin travelled to the British town Salisbury in March 2018 and allegedly poisoned former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

According to Bellingcat, Mishkin was born in the Archangelsk District in northern Russia.

He was recruited by the GRU while at one of Russia’s military medical academies, eventually becoming a military doctor. 

“Until early September 2014, Mishkin’s registered home address in Moscow was Khoroshevskoe Shosse 76B – the address of the headquarters of the GRU,” Bellingcat’s investigation concluded.

The intelligence service provided Mishkin with a new identity and corresponding paperwork.

Using this identity, Alexander Petrov, travelled extensively to several European countries including Ukraine and Moldova.

In March 2018, he travelled to the UK with someone called Anatoliy Chepiga, who used documents proclaiming he was called Ruslan Boshirov.

There, they allegedly poisoned Skripal, who was a former Russian intelligence officer turned double agent, using a rare chemical nerve agent called Novichok.

Following the poisoning, both Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia spent several weeks in a hospital, but both ultimately survived.

Last month, the UK charged the two Russians with conspiracy to murder and attempted murder.

“Based on the body of intelligence, the government has concluded that the two individuals named by the police and the Crown Prosecution Service are officers from the Russian military intelligence service, also known as the GRU,” British Prime Minister Theresa May told parliament at the time.

“This was also not a rogue operation. It was almost certainly approved outside the GRU at a senior level of the Russian state,” she said.

Russia has denied any involvement in the case and has claimed the two Russians were in Salisbury on a tourist trip.

Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin again denied involvement in the poisoning, but he branded the former spy “a traitor” and “scumbag”.

Bellingcat is a group of researchers who mostly use open source information to verify information.

They have previously published investigations about chemical attacks in Syria and the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17.

Sri Lanka has failed to fulfil pledges to return properties to thousands of people forced from their homes during three decades of war, many of whom now live in desperate poverty.

US-based rights group, Human Rights Watch (HRW), in a report published on Tuesday, said thousands of acres of land, taken over during the civil war, are still held by government forces, who set up security posts and buffer zones.

The 80-page report, titled, “Why Can’t We Go Home?”: Military Occupation of Land in Sri Lanka, is based on over 100 interviews between August 2017 to May 2018 with members of affected communities, activists, local officials, and lawyers.

“Now, there is no war. It’s now peacetime. So, why can’t we go back home?” Francis Croos, a resident of Mullikulam village in Mannar district, told HRW.

State agencies such as the wildlife department hold properties as well, said the report, which looks into cases of military occupation across six districts, primarily in the country’s north and east.

“All those displaced during Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war are entitled to return to their homes,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at HRW.

“Despite repeated pledges by the authorities, the military has been frustratingly slow to restore land to the rightful owners,” Ganguly said in a statement.

Countries dealing with conflict and its aftermath often face challenges returning property to those forced from their land, caused by a loss of records, overlapping claims, and a lack of necessary institutional and regulatory frameworks.

In Sri Lanka, most of those who fled their homes during the war were Tamils, an ethnic and religious Hindu minority in the largely Buddhist country.

Hundreds of thousands of Tamils were displaced several times over during the conflict, Ganguly said.

More than 10,000 people remain in camps, and many others are still “effectively displaced”, living with other communities or close to areas where they fled from, she said.

‘Lack of transparency’

The government has said it has returned between 80 percent and 85 percent of the confiscated land to original owners.

But while authorities have taken steps to return the land to the original owners, the process has been hindered by a lack of transparency and claims about national security, Ganguly said.

President Maithripala Sirisena last week said he had ordered the release of all civilian lands held by the state in the northern and eastern provinces by December 31.

“But the government must also draw up a resettlement policy to ensure adequate reparations and infrastructure on the land, including shelters, access to water, healthcare, education and public transport,” said Ruki Fernando, a human rights activist.

“It is crucial to ensure that the lands are in fit condition for people to live in dignity,” said Fernando, an adviser to INFORM, a human rights documentation centre in Colombo.

“Merely relocating people or providing financial compensation is not enough,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

US President Donald Trump expressed concern about the fate of prominent Saudi journalist and regime critic Jamal Khashoggi, who vanished after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last week.

“I am concerned. I don’t like hearing about it. Hopefully that will sort itself out,” Trump told reporters at the White House. 

“Right now, nobody knows anything about it. There are some pretty bad stories going around. I do not like it.”

Khashoggi, a US resident, has written articles over the past year critical of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. On the eve of his planned marriage to a Turkish woman, he entered the consulate on October 2 and has not been seen since.     

Turkish officials have said he was murdered inside the building. Riyadh denies that and claims he left the compound on his own.

US Vice President Mike Pence also waded into the controversy over the disappeared Saudi, saying “the free world deserves answers”.

Deeply troubled to hear reports about Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi. If true, this is a tragic day. Violence against journalists across the globe is a threat to freedom of the press & human rights. The free world deserves answers.

— Vice President Mike Pence (@VP) October 8, 2018

Two senior senators of Trump’s Republican party warned on Monday the US-Saudi relationship could be imperiled if the stories about Khashoggi are correct.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said Riyadh must provide “honest answers” about the journalist.

“We agree that if there was any truth to the allegations of wrongdoing by the Saudi government it would be devastating to the US-Saudi relationship and there will be a heavy price to be paid – economically and otherwise,” Graham tweeted.

“Our country’s values should be and must be a cornerstone of our foreign policy with foes and allies alike,” he said.

Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, warned against governments attacking journalists outside their countries.

“I have raised Jamal’s disappearance personally with the Saudi ambassador, and while we await more information, know we will respond accordingly to any state that targets journalists abroad,” he wrote.

US-based political analyst Bill Schneider told Al Jazeera the chorus of comments by American officials indicates the level concern over the journalist’s fate and the close relationship between Trump and Saudi leaders.

“They’re under pressure from members of congress and the press. Members of congress are talking about an investigation… The result is there is pressure domestically to look into this matter,” said Schneider.

‘Cannot save themselves’

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday that Saudi officials must prove that Khashoggi left the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. 

“We have to get an outcome from this investigation as soon as possible. The consulate officials cannot save themselves by simply saying ‘he has left’,” Erdogan said.

The 59-year-old contributor to the Washington Post spent last year in the United States in self-imposed exile after he fled Saudi Arabia amid a crackdown on intellectuals and activists who criticised the policies of Prince Mohammed. He was last seen by his fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, entering the consulate to obtain a document needed for their marriage. She and Turkish officials say he never emerged, even though Saudi Arabia insists he left the building.

Turkish authorities have said they believe Khashoggi was most likely killed inside the consulate building and his body later removed from the premises, though they haven’t provided any evidence.

The Washington Post also pressured the administration to investigate.     

“If Mr Khashoggi was murdered inside the consulate, it will cast the Saudi regime and its de facto ruler – Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – in a new and disturbing light and require a thorough re-evaluation of US-Saudi relations,” the newspaper said in an op-ed.

Khashoggi, 59, has had a long career as a senior journalist in Saudi Arabia and also as an advisor to top officials.     

But since the emergence of Prince Mohammed, 33, as the centre of power in the kingdom last year, Khashoggi has been openly critical of the monarchy.

He has assailed the prince’s reforms as hollow, accusing him of introducing a new Saudi era of “fear, intimidation, arrests and public shaming”.

‘Crossed the line’

Killing someone such as Khashoggi – who long had ties to the royal family and the Saudi intelligence apparatus – in a consulate would be a major escalation in the prince’s rise.

“I think the Saudis may have crossed the line. It puts the US in a corner. Will it defend its ally or will it stand up for human rights and free speech and free journalism?” said Yoel Guzansky, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, a top Israeli think tank, and a former adviser to the Israeli prime minister on Iran and Gulf affairs.

Ties between Turkey and Saudi Arabia are at a low point over Ankara’s support for Qatar last year in its dispute with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations. Turkey sent food to Qatar and deployed troops at its military base there.

Saudi Arabia is also annoyed by Ankara’s rapprochement with its arch-rival, Iran.

“Turkey is maintaining a very delicate balance in its relations with Saudi Arabia. The relations have the potential of evolving into a crisis at any moment,” said Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, director of the German Marshall Fund’s Ankara office.

He expected a measured response from Turkey, which is suffering a currency crisis and would be reluctant to chase away investment from Saudi Arabia or other Gulf states.

Ankara would likely wait and see what Washington’s reaction to the disappearance would be, before initiating any action against Saudi Arabia, Unluhisarcikli added.

Sultan al-Saad al-Qahtani, the editor of the Riyadh Post website and a supporter of the crown prince, called the situation “a Hollywood movie scenario”.

“There is no country that kills opponents of its policy inside an official building in a foreign country,” he said. “The responsibility of preserving Mr Khashoggi’s life rests with the Turkish government.”

Journalists and activists gathered outside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul also demanded information on Khashoggi’s fate.

“We demand from the international community to pressure Saudi Arabia and Mohammed bin Salman to tell us exactly what happened,” said Mohamed Okad, a friend of Khashoggi and founder of Insight into Crisis, a conflict advisory group.

Washington, DC – With the vicious Senate battle over the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh concluded by a 50-48 vote, focus now turns to the upcoming midterm elections.

Early indicators are that the Republican base was energised by Kavanaugh while women voters, who already favour Democrats by nearly a 2-1 margin, were polarised even more than they were before. Early poll numbers suggest modest gains for Republicans within an overall environment that remains negative for the party of President Donald Trump, analysts say.

Saturday’s confirmation came after a limited FBI investigation into accusations of sexual assault and other sexual misconduct were made against the judge. Among the allegations were those of Christine Blasey Ford, who accused Kavanaugh of groping her and trying to remove her clothing when they were both teenagers in the 1980s. Kavanaugh denied the allegations.

Prior to the Kavanaugh fight, Democrats were widely favoured to win control of the House of Representatives and Republicans were expected to retain command of the Senate, albeit narrowly. That odd and seemingly contradictory scenario in which the two chambers of Congress move in different directions remains the most likely scenario. Differences in gender and attitudes on sexual assault amid the #MeToo movement are likely to be critical.

“The initial effect I thought it would have was that, whichever side won in the confirmation would have a relative loss in the election, that the opposite party was going to be mobilised to show up,” said Richard L Pacelle Jr, head of the political science department at the University of Tennessee. “But multiple polls are showing that this has really energised the Republican voters,” he told Al Jazeera. Right now, I think it’s really unclear what’s going to be the result of this.” 

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the Kavanaugh fight will help Republicans on November 6.

“We’d been trying to figure out how to get the base excited about this election, and nothing unifies Republicans like a court fight,” McConnell told Reuters news agency on Saturday, just before the vote.

But the anger over the confirmation, particularly among women, may further galvanise the Democratic base.

Will voters show up?

Voter enthusiasm, a measure of how inclined registered voters are to go vote on election day, favoured Democrats over Republicans, according to a mid-September survey by Pew Research Center. Driven largely by opinions of President Donald Trump and interest in who controls Congress, 67 percent of Democrats and 59 percent of Republicans – record levels for both parties – told Pew they were more enthusiastic about voting this year.

“There was a huge enthusiasm gap between Democrat and Republican voters going into the midterms. That has all disappeared in three weeks and it has disappeared in just about every single poll,” Pacelle said. “I would expect it to rebound slightly to the Democrats advantage. Democrats right now are kind of licking their wounds, wondering what’s next, what can we do. If they get over that and show up at the polls, that will help [their numbers].” 

Trump’s job approval rating, which had declined in September, bounced back with the Kavanaugh hearings, but remains negative. An October 1-7 survey of 1,500 adults nationwide by Gallup, which tracks Trump’s approval, found a negative 10-percentage-point spread between 53 percent who disapprove and 43 percent who approve. The disapproval spread was as wide as 18 percentage points in the Gallup poll of September 16.

“The president’s numbers are a little bit better now than they were in September. Part of it is because the president seems to do better when he is not dominating the news. We will have to see if that changes in the closing weeks here,” said Kyle Kondik, an elections analyst at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “The jury is still out,” he said. “But as of this point, if your initial outlook was Democrats favoured in the House, Republicans favoured in the Senate, we haven’t seen a whole lot to change that.”

The effect on Senate races

The Kavanaugh controversy will likely affect Senate races more than those of the House because of the Senate’s constitutional role in confirming judges. Much of the focus during the debate on Kavanaugh was on positions of Republican women senators and Democrats seeking re-election in states where Trump does well with Republican voters. Battle for control of the Senate is being waged in 10 states where Democrats and Republicans are in competitive contests. 

One Democrat senator running for re-election, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, voted for Kavanaugh. Every other Democrat voted ‘no’. Senator Joe Donnelly, an anti-abortion rights Democrat running for re-election in Indiana, voted against him, as did Senator Heidi Heitkamp, who is struggling to hold onto her seat in North Dakota. Likewise, Democrats competing in close races in Florida, Missouri and New Jersey felt safe enough to vote against Kavanaugh. 

Kavanaugh plays differently depending on regional variations in how particular electorates view issues of government control of women’s reproductive rights, whether they believe women are discriminated against more than other groups, and how sexual assault accusations are viewed.

Key questions analysts are wrestling with in assessing what the Kavanaugh episode means in US politics revolve around gender, attitudes towards the #MeToo movement and whether a reactionary backlash stoked by Trump will show up on election day.

In Texas, where Senator Ted Cruz has been facing an unexpectedly strong challenge by Democrat Beto O’Rourke, how Republican women respond to the Kavanaugh debate, whether they stay home or turn out to vote, could potentially make a difference.

“The strategic assumption of a candidate like Ted Cruz running state-wide in Texas is that – however well Beto O’Rourke is doing at potentially motivating new Democratic voters and bringing new people into the process – the scale of the Republican advantage is such that if Ted Cruz can simply mobilise all or most of the Republican voters, they can absorb the new turnout generated by even a wildly successful O’Rourke campaign,” James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas, told Al Jazeera.

In Tennessee’s senate race, Republican Marsha Blackburn immediately supported Kavanaugh and jumped to an eight-percentage-point lead over Democrat Phil Bredesen, according to a new CBS poll. Bredesen, a former two-term governor of the state, is seeking to claim the seat of retiring Senator Bob Corker and had been leading in the polls. 

“He declined to really say how he would vote on Kavanaugh if he was there,” Pacelle said. “That race has turned a little. She is running many more ads than he is. It’s starting to have an impact. She’s hitting him hard. He has been pretty quiet in response.”

The Senate balance hangs on a knife’s edge. In Arizona, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema leads narrowly by three points, and in Nevada Democrat Jacky Rosen leads incumbent Republican Dean Heller by four points. In Florida, incumbent Republican Bill Nelson only leads his Republican challenger by one point.

#NovemberIsComing

In the lead-up to Kavanaugh’s confirmation thousands of women and their supporters took to Capitol Hill to protest against the nominee. Hundreds were arrested during the demonstrations, which saw women leading sit-ins in Senate buildings, occupying the steps of the Capitol building and confronting Senators in the hallways and elevators, in an attempt to persuade them to change their vote on Kavanaugh.

After the confirmation, much at that attention turned to encouraging women and others to get out to vote next month, with many using #NovemberIsComing on Twitter to encourage women to go to the polls.

Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts introduced an action plan to respond to the Kavanaugh confirmation.

“It hurts every survivor of sexual assault who has been ignored,” Warren told protesters just before the Senate vote took place.

She encouraged demonstrators to “take back the House … take back the Senate”, adding that “”We have forged a bond that will make us stronger in the next fight.”