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The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) is supporting a new anti-child marriage movement in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, where nearly half of all girls become child brides and one-third become teenage mothers even though the legal marriage age is 18. We need to have a zero-tolerance policy towards child marriage, so that every child, boy and girl, has the opportunity to live their childhood and gain an education said Karin Hulshof, UNICEF India Representative.

Two female suicide bombers blew themselves up on the Moscow subway during the morning rush hour today, killing at least 35 people and injuring 51, Russian officials said. Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, told reporters the suicide bombers were believed to have set off their explosives as trains approached Lubyanka and Park Kultury metro stations. "The first data that the FSB [Federal Security Service] has given us is that there were two female suicide bombers," he told reporters at Park Kultury.

If Winston Blackmore and his fundamentalist Mormon congregation in Bountiful don't get equal standing with the attorneys-general of B.C. and Canada as well as funding, they will boycott the reference case that will determine whether the anti-polygamy law is constitutional. Blackmore's application, heard Friday by Chief Justice Robert Bauman of the B.C. Supreme Court, was pointedly and colloquially summarized by three different lawyers. Update on: Canada: Polygamist leader suing B.C. government

Margot Wallström, the recently appointed Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, voiced concern about the “lingering assumption that sexual violence is a tradition, rather than a tactic of choice” by groups engaged in war.Sexual violence during conflicts is all too often downplayed and treated as part of local cultural traditions instead of being viewed as a war crime, a senior United Nations official has warned as she called for much greater international action to defeat the scourge.

“Prevailing op