Sri Lanka said on Thursday it would bar women of all ages from traveling abroad to work in menial jobs, following an international outcry over the beheading of a young nanny in Saudi Arabia.

Information Minister Keheliya Rambukwella announced that women under 25 were now banned from going to the Arab state to work as maids, adding that it was the first step towards a worldwide travel ban for low-paying jobs.

Sri Lanka's President Mahinda Rajapakse Sunday sacked the country's first woman chief justice by ratifying parliament's vote to impeach her, his spokesman said.

The move came despite mounting calls on Rajapakse to halt the impeachment which has been seen by rights groups and Western nations as a blow to judicial independence in a country emerging from decades of ethnic war.

The U.N.'s human rights body on Friday said it was 'deeply' dismayed by Saudi Arabia's beheading of a Sri Lankan maid convicted of murdering her employer's baby.

"We express our deep dismay at the execution," Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, told reporters in Geneva.

Saudi Arabia beheaded a Sri Lankan maid on Wednesday after she was convicted of murdering her employer's baby, the interior ministry announced, despite calls for a stay of execution.

Rizana Nafeek smothered the infant to death after an argument with the child's mother, her employer, the ministry statement carried by the official SPA news agency said.

Police in Sri Lanka have arrested 100 Chinese nationals for currency fraud in a string of raids in and around the capital Colombo, officials said Saturday.

"They have defrauded their countrymen by making them... transfer money to accounts maintained in Sri Lanka in the names of those arrested," Prishantha Jayakodi, a senior superintendent, told Agence France Presse.

Flash floods have killed at least 25 people in Sri Lanka and left more than a quarter of a million marooned in their homes, disaster officials said Thursday.

Heavy rains, which have battered the island for much of the week, were still being reported in 14 of Sri Lanka's 25 administrative districts, with the central highlands -- one of the world's key tea producing regions -- the worst hit.

Sri Lanka's health ministry announced plans on Tuesday to draw up new guidelines for donating food to the country's venerated Buddhist monks amid concerns about their weight and health.

The ministry said the faithful, who offer alms as a religious tradition, tended to give food that was too high in fat and sugar and monks were developing preventable health conditions such as heart disease and diabetes.

A Sri Lankan court Friday fined a Russian couple around 1.2 million rupees ($9,230) for illegally collecting endangered orchids and other exotic flora, obstructing wildlife officials and attacking a cameraman.

A magistrate at Ratnapura, just outside the highly protected Sinharaja rainforest region, found the couple guilty of holding 345 exotic plants representing 32 species on an endangered list.

Sri Lankan troops found 11 bodies of convicts Saturday raising the death toll in an overnight prison riot in the capital to 27, prisons minister said.

Minister Chandrasiri Gajadeera told parliament that 27 people were killed in Friday's rioting at Colombo's maximum security Welikada prison where inmates fought gunbattles with elite police commandos who carried out a search.

A Sri Lankan man who was gunned down in Paris was Friday identified as Nadarajah Mathinthiran, a former Tamil Tiger commander who had been convicted in France of extortion and raising funds for terrorism.

Mathinthiran, who was born in 1963, was shot dead on Thursday evening as he came out of the headquarters of the Tamil Coordination Committee in France (CCTF), an organization regarded as a front for what remains of the Tigers.