'Britain's Fritzl' raped daughters for over 25yrs

Pop superstar Madonna will not allow a man who claims to be the biological father of her adopted Malawian daughter to see the four-year-old, a South African newspaper reported on Sunday.James Kambewa, 26, who is working as a waiter in Durban, had hoped to meet Mercy whom the wealthy star adopted last year but Madonna's spokeswoman Barbara Charone said the child's father was not known."The extended family members had no knowledge of a father. The village leadership had no knowledge of a father... the mother was raped and left," the Sunday Times quoted Charone as saying.

Iran has hanged four men convicted of rape and another man found guilty of drug trafficking in Tehran, government newspaper Iran reported on Wednesday.The men hanged on Tuesday were identified as Mehdi, 33, convicted of raping at least two teenage boys, an unnamed 21-year-old man who had raped a retarded 22-year-old woman two years ago, and two other unnamed men who had broken into a house late at night and raped a woman.

The "Yorkshire Ripper", one of Britain's most notorious serial killers, must spend the rest of his life in jail, the High Court ruled Friday, in a decision welcomed with relief by victims' relatives.Peter Sutcliffe was convicted in 1981 of murdering 13 women and attempting to murder seven others in Yorkshire and in Manchester, northern England in an extremely high-profile case.He received 20 life sentences and is detained at Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital in southeast England.

A five-year-old British boy was reunited with his father in Pakistan on Thursday, a British high commission official said following a kidnapping ordeal that saw a ransom paid in Paris.Sahil Saeed was recovered by Pakistani police on Tuesday after being dropped near the town where he was kidnapped at gunpoint from his grandmother's house as he and his father prepared to fly home to Britain after a family holiday.

Pregnant women may be far more at risk from swine flu than thought, according to a survey published on Friday that was carried out in Australia and New Zealand.An investigation carried out among American women between April and May last year, in the first month of the H1N1 virus' outbreak, suggested pregnant women were four times likelier to develop severe illness requiring hospitalisation compared with non-pregnant counterparts.

Nolizwi Sinama was 14 years old when her family swapped her for three cows and forced her into marrying a man three times her age.Now staying at a local shelter for abused youth, the shy teenager fidgets nervously and fights back the tears as she talks about her three-year ordeal, during which she was raped daily.Her family abandoned her at the house of her new "husband," a 42-year-old widower from KwaCele village, in a once-forgotten practice that is now being revived by poor, rural South African families desperate for money.

Nolizwi Sinama was 14 years old when her family swapped her for three cows and forced her into marrying a man three times her age.Now staying at a local shelter for abused youth, the shy teenager fidgets nervously and fights back the tears as she talks about her three-year ordeal, during which she was raped daily.Her family abandoned her at the house of her new "husband," a 42-year-old widower from KwaCele village, in a once-forgotten practice that is now being revived by poor, rural South African families desperate for money.

Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams revealed that his father subjected family members to sexual and physical abuse.Adams, one of the most important figures in Northern Irish politics over the past 30 years, said his father sexually abused his children and his family were still recovering from the trauma.Adams, one of 10 children who survived infancy, said he had revisited his childhood home and scenes of the abuse but could not recall being abused personally.