INDIA

An Indian court sent a former Test cricketer and MP to prison Thursday for killing a man in a road-rage outburst in 1988, officials said. Navjot Singh Sidhu surrendered before the Punjab and Haryana High Court in line with orders of the Indian Supreme Court and was arrested and sent to prison, court officials from the northern city of Chandigarh said.

A leopard loped into the bathroom of a home in western India, attracting thousands of curious onlookers for hours before it was captured by officials, a report said on Monday. The leopard strolled around a neighbourhood in western Vadodara city for a few hours before settling down in the bathroom of the Sukhadia family, the <i>Times of India</i> said.

India ordered a high-level probe on Wednesday into the discovery of skulls and bones of at least 17 people, many of them children, at a house outside New Delhi, which police say is a gruesome case of serial killing. The remains were dug up last week from the backyard of a house in Noida, an industrial town on the outskirts of the Indian capital.

A two-year-old calf that escaped slaughter at an abattoir in Mumbai for a Muslim festival has been named George, after the American president, a report said on Wednesday. George bolted and ran into a scrap yard where he kept butchers at bay for 20 hours, the <i>Times of India</i> reported.

Ten million girls have been killed by their parents in India in the past 20 years, either before they were born or immediately after, a government minister said on Thursday, describing it as a ”national crisis”. A United Nations Children’s Fund report released this week said 7 000 fewer girls are born in the country every day than the global average would suggest.

Tourism officials in the Indian coastal resort state of Goa are having a tough time finding lifeguards after just one candidate out of 129 passed the swimming test, a report said. Only one could swim 400m in the mandatory nine minutes and nearly half could not complete the stretch at all, the <i>Times of India</i> reported under the headline "No Baywatch in Goa: Lifeguards flunk test."

Seven thousand fewer girls are born in India each day than the global average would suggest, largely because female foetuses are aborted after sex-determination tests, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) said on Tuesday. The problem of female foeticide has significantly worsened since 1991, Unicef said.

Indian selectors have recalled former captain Saurav Ganguly for next month’s three-Test series in South Africa. India’s poor batting form in one-day cricket and uncertainty over skipper Rahul Dravid’s availability for the opening Test in Johannesburg due to a finger injury prompted Ganguly’s recall on Thursday to bolster the brittle middle-order.

India’s cricket authorities on Friday asked chief selector Dilip Vengsarkar to fly to South Africa following the team’s crushing defeat in the second one-day international in Durban. Rahul Dravid’s Indians were widely criticised in the cricket-crazy country following their 157-run defeat on a pacy Durban track on Wednesday.

The Indian cricket board asked chief selector Dilip Vengsarkar on Friday to travel to South Africa amid stinging criticism following the team’s bad start to the tour. South Africa crushed India by 157 runs in the second one-day international on Wednesday after skittling them for 91 on a bouncy Durban pitch.

India leave for South Africa on Monday night praying their key cricketers deliver on the tough tour, after a string of below-par performances in recent one-day internationals. ”I think we need to get performances from a lot of our key players,” India captain Rahul Dravid said before the team’s departure for the two-month tour.