Girls offered to settle blood feud

Pakistan’s top constitutional court has ordered the arrest of an MP for alleged involvement in forced marriages of five girls aged between one and five years.

Mir Hazar Khan Bijarani of the Pakistan People’s Party headed a “jirga” or a tribal council which allegedly ordered the weddings to settle a dispute. 
The case centres around the custom of “vani” in which blood feuds are settled through forced marriage.

Fake encounter

The government in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh has ordered a probe into an alleged extra-judicial killing of a man which was shown on TV.  The footage showed the man volunteering to surrender and raising his hands and then being shot.

Security forces in India are often blamed for carrying out “fake encounters” or extra-judicial killings. “The guilty policemen will not be spared,” said a senior official.

Monsoon mayhem

Torrential rains have stranded some 19 million across much of northern India, Bangladesh and Nepal, flooding rivers and submerging villages and farmland. Since the monsoon started in June, more than 1,550 people have died in India alone.

Authorities rushed food, drinking water and medicine to India’s flood-hit areas today to ward off epidemics, as thousands of people returned to their damaged homes.

Junk food ban

With India’s children getting increasingly overweight and unhealthy, the government is asking schools to ban junk food. Obesity is emerging as a serious health problem in urban India, a paradox in a country where nearly half the children are malnourished and underweight. “We can’t tell parents what to feed their children, but we can give them guidelines about healthy eating,” said a government official.

Rupee ruckus

Pakistan has ordered an inquiry into why the national flag depicted on the new 1,000 rupee banknote is not in green but red and carries a close resemblance to its Turkish equivalent. The design, while including Pakistan’s and Turkey’s crescent and star emblem, lacks the distinguishing white stripe on the flag’s left-hand border. “It is a big mistake and it should be rectified,” officials said.