Father killed baby girl in India

A 3 month old baby girl on Wednesday in New Delhi was killed by her father who wanted a son.  Neha Afreen died from cardiac arrest at a state-run hospital in India's tech hub of Bangalore after battling for life for three days. Afreen was brought to the hospital with head injuries, abrasions and bite marks all over the body, causing national outrage that led to the arrest of her father on Monday. "My husband was enraged with me for delivering a girl," Afreen s mother Reshma Banu told reporters. "He hated her. He wanted me to get rid of the child or abandon her as he wanted a son." Afreen s case is the latest in a string of incidents across India where baby girls have been abandoned, tortured or even killed because they were unwanted. Girls are often viewed as a burden in traditional families as they require hefty dowries to be married off and the practice of aborting female foetuses is rampant. The preference for male children has led to a huge and alarming gender imbalance, with 2011 census data showing just 914 girls per 1,000 boys across India -- much behind the global benchmark of 952.

A massive earthquake off

Indonesia lifted a tsunami warning which was issued following a massive 8.9 earthquake. "People can return to their homes," Sri Woro Harijono, head of Indonesia s Meteorology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG), said on Metro TV. Panicked residents, remembering a 2004 tsunami that killed 170,000 people on Sumatra s Aceh province, poured out of their homes and fled coastal areas after the massive quake, which was followed by an 8.2-magnitude aftershock. Indonesia cancelled the warning shortly after the US Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii lifted its Indian Ocean-wide tsunami alert. At least three tsunamis of up to 80 centimetres (31 inches) hit Indonesia s coast after the initial earthquake, BMKG monitor Said Kristiawan told AFP before the warning was lifted. The earthquake’s movement was horizontal, not vertical, and caused no apparent movement of the sea floor, which is what triggers tsunamis, Susanne Sargeant, a seismologist with the British Geological Survey (BGS) told AFP.