Dushanbe: Tajikistan President Rahmon told women to avoid using veil as it is used by prostitutes. Rahmon who has ruled the former Soviet republic since 1992, has expressed concern over the rise of Islamism among his eight million subjects, around 90 per cent of whom are Muslims. The government has harassed men with beards, closed independent mosques, attempted to ban children from mosques and forbidden the wearing of hijab in public in some circumstances. The government has told shopkeepers who sell Islamic veils to close down their shops to discourage women from using the veils.
Former dictator wins in Nigeria’s landmark poll
Abuja: Nigeria’s main opposition party claimed victory in Africa’s largest democracy as General Muhammadu Buhari beat the incumbent, Goodluck Jonathan, by more than two and a half million votes. With all the votes counted, General Buhari won with 53.96 per cent, or 15,424,921 votes, to Jonathan’s 44.96 per cent, or 12,853,126 votes, in the country’s first democratic transfer of power.
“The people of Nigeria have taken over,” Lai Mohammed, a spokesman for the All Progressive Congress Party (APC), said. Jonathan’s People’s Democratic party (PDP) has ruled Nigeria since military rule ended in 1999, but his tenure was dogged by scandals and the failure to tackle Boko Haram, which has killed thousands of people in the country’s northeast and captured large tracts of territory.
A grandmother dies after a mobile operator disconnected her phone
London: A grandmother Sheila Secker, 78, died because she could not use the mobile phone to call her son for help. The service provider had disconnected her connection because it had not been in use for sometime. She collapsed at home and was unable to contact her family on the mobile she had owned for 14 years. Not until the next day nobody knew anything about her illness. Secker died a few days later in hospital.
100 Islamist teachers face ban
London: As many as 100 teachers and teaching assistants could be prevented from working in schools for life as a result of an investigation into their alleged links to the so-called Trojan Horse scandal. The National College for Teaching and Leadership (NCTL), the profession’s watchdog, which can ban teachers from classrooms, is working on possible disciplinary cases against current and former staff members at schools in Birmingham, which were the focus of the Trojan Horse scandal, which saw efforts by hardline Islamists to take control of state schools.
Murray and his f fiancée refuse to sell their wedding
London: THEY could have netted £1m at a stroke but the Tennis star Andy Murray and his fiancée, Kim Sears, have refused to sell their wedding to glossy magazines, which could have fetched them £1 million and instead preferred to share the occasion only with close family and friends, including the comedian James Corden. The couple have rejected offers up to seven figures for exclusive pictures of the wedding day from celebrity magazines including OK! and Hello!, said a source.
Former Bangla PM gets bail
Dhaka: Bangladesh's opposition chief and former and former PM Khaleda Zia was granted bail in two graft cases after she appeared in an office for the first time in three months, amid signs that the country's political logjam was easing. The 69-year-old Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) chairperson left her upmarket Gulshan office where she has been staying since January 3 to surrender in a special anti-graft court that granted her bail in two graft cases involving over $ 650,000. Zia's court appearance came 39 days after an arrest warrant was issued against her over repeated absence from trial in graft cases involving two charities named after her husband, slain president Zia-ur Rahman, and could see her jailed for life
Indian-American woman jailed on charges of feticide
Washington: A judge in America's conservative heartland has sentenced an Indian-American woman to at least 20 years in prison on charges of feticide and child neglect in a case that goes to the heart of the US debate on abortion and women's reproductive rights. Purvi Patel (33), who comes from a family of Indian immigrants settled in South Bend, Indiana, came into the emergency room of a local medical centre with heavy bleeding in July 2013. After doctors determined she had lost a pregnancy, she confessed she had delivered a stillborn baby and had abandoned it in a dumpster after hiding her situation from her strict orthodox parents. She said he had tried to revive the baby, which was born at an estimated 24 weeks, and she did not call 911 because she had panicked. Following a surgery to remove her placenta, Patel became a criminal suspect in the eyes of a state that has become a byword for conservatism amid a raging ongoing controversy over the rights of women and minorities.
