Reuters, London
British police said on Friday they had arrested 44 people as part of an investigation into historical child sex abuse in northern England.
West Yorkshire Police said 36 men and three women had been detained over the last two weeks over the inquiry which is centered on allegations from four women that they were abused as children, predominantly in the towns of Dewsbury and Batley between 1995 and 2002.
China police raids rescue 1,100
trafficked women
AP, Beijing
Chinese police rescued 1,130 abducted foreign women in the second half of last year in coordinated operations with five Southeast Asian countries, the Ministry of Public Security said Friday.
Police arrested 1,322 suspects, including 262 foreigners, for allegedly luring and kidnapping women after promising jobs or marriages, the ministry said, in what appears to be the largest such operation to date.
Sharif’s bail plea rejected on
medical grounds
PTI, Islamabad:
A Pakistani court on Thursday turned down a plea by jailed ex-prime minister Nawaz Sharif to suspend his sentence in a corruption case and grant him bail on medical grounds.
Nawaz Sharif has been serving a seven-year prison term at the Kot Lakhpat Jail in Lahore since December 24, 2018 when an accountability court convicted him in the Al-Azizia steel mills corruption case filed in the wake of the top court’s July 28, 2017 order in Panama Papers case.
Storms bring tornadoes, power outages across US
AP, Atlanta
Storms were blamed for two deaths and left hundreds of thousands of people without power across the southern United States, forecasters said.
Fallen trees ripped down power lines and crashed into buildings along a line from Texas to Alabama overnight and into Thursday morning, the national Storm Prediction Center reported. Similar damage continued later in the day in parts of Georgia, the Carolinas and southeast Virginia..
