28 arrested after ‘revenge rape’ case
ISLAMABAD— Mohammad Ashfaq, a villager in Pakistan’s Punjab province, came to the village council with a harrowing complaint: His 12year-old sister had been raped by a 15-year-old boy, a distant cousin.
The council prescribed an equally harrowing punishment: Mr. Ashfaq, 20, should publicly rape the boy’s sister, who is 16.
Mr. Ashfaq carried out the punishment in a case of “revenge rape” that has shocked Pakistan and reached all the way to the country’s Supreme Court.
Police have arrested 28 people in a village outside thecity of Multan, in southern Punjab, including the head of the council, which included family members of both alleged rapists.
The15-year-old, Umar Wada, was also arrested, but police were still searching for Mr. Ashfaq, said Shahida Nasreen, a senior police official in Multan and head of the Violence Against Women Center.
“Honor crimes” are common in Pakistan, where villagers seek to punish those over a family’s sullied reputation.
The rape case has caused an uproar in Pakistan, where rights advocates denounced the state of women’s rights in the country.
Citizenship stripped
MOSCOW— Once they were prominent allies in opposing the Kremlin: President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine and the former president of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili. Mr. Saakashvili even went sofar as to emigrate to Ukraine to serve as a regional governor under Mr. Poroshenko.
But they have now fallen out so badly that on Wednesday, Mr. Poroshenko stripped Mr. Saakashvili of his Ukrainian citizenship, leaving him stateless.
The conflict between them centers on Ukraine’s widespread corruption. Afterthe 2014 revolution over threw a pro-Russian president in Ukraine, Mr. Saakashvili and about a doze nother Georgian officials with experience rooting out corruption moved to Ukraine to join the new government.But before long, Mr. Saak ash vi li became disillusioned, saying thatthe country was doing too little to fight corruption.
Here signed his post and setup an opposition political movement, and in the process badly soured his relations with Mr. Poroshenko. That culminated in the decree Mr. Poroshenko signed on Wednesday.
Japan party leader exits
The leader of Japan’s struggling main opposition party said Thursday she would resign after less than a year in the job.
Renho, who generally goes by only one name, becamethe first woman in two decades to lead a major politicalparty in Japan when she took the helm of the Democratic Party last September.But she failed to smooth over intra-party clashes and oversaw a heavy defeat in the Tokyo local assembly election earlier this month.
She had been plagued about her dual nationality — her father was Taiwanese — but she faced no internal challenge, and analysts were puzzled about why she stepped down at a time when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is struggling.
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The British High Court decided that Charlie Gard, the chronically ill British infant whose condition has spurred widespread debate about end-of-life care and parents’ rights, will spend his last moments in a hospice before he is taken off life support.