In the UK Telegraph, Angus McDowall and Abdullah Al Muyid visit the Bangladesh orphanage from where John and Cindy McCain adopted their daughter, Bridget
A nun at the orphanage from where John and Cindy McCain adopted a baby girl 17 years ago
The adopted daughter of the party’s presidential nominee, had been plucked from a Dhaka orphanage as a desperately ill baby girl after a cyclone struck Bangladesh in 1991.
Shyly waving from the podium, the epitome of the bashful schoolgirl, Bridget charmed the hall full of Republican activists gathered last week to acclaim their party’s choice for president.
It was a world away from her roots in the backstreet orphanage in Dhaka, capital of one of the world’s poorest countries, which The Sunday Telegraph traced last week.
Around the Sisters of Charity of Mother Teresa Children’s Home, the streets are so full and chaotic that it is easier to go on foot than ride a rickshaw or moped through the bustling crowds.
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Pallavi Srivastava in The Times of India reports on a new move for child-free zones
Smoking not allowed. Pets not allowed. Children not allowed. The last is not yet a condition of entry into restaurants, multiplexes and aircraft in famously family-minded India, but many believe it’s an idea whose time has come and a trickle of hoteliers and others are starting to provide child-free nirvana for those who want it.
Aadisht Khanna, a 25-year-old Mumbai stockbroker is one of the reasons child-unfriendly businesses such as The Tryst, a family-run Coonoor guesthouse, ply their trade. Khanna runs a blog that repeatedly complains about the menace of unruly children and is calling for “business traveller-specific flights, which have an intermediate class between economy and business and use a combination of premium pricing, timing, and actually disallowing children to make the flight child-free”.
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The blizzard of off-court controversies into which Sania Mirza has been dragged cannot lay her low, writes her uncle Maseeh Rahman in the Indian Express
“Come on. Keep fighting!” For a while on Show Court 3 at the Australian Open on Thursday, it seemed as if Sania Mirza was going to buckle under the pressure and surrender. After winning the first set 6-1 in her typically aggressive style, her game had faltered, and she looked pensive as she submitted 4-6 in the second. Now she was down 1-3 in the decider, and her Swiss-Hungarian opponent Timea Bacsinszky threatened to run away with the match.
The exhortation from the players’ box had come from her father, Imran Mirza, and it had sounded like part instruction, part encouragement. Like many Indian families, the Mirzas are extremely close-knit, and Imran has played a pivotal role in Sania’s emergence as a world-class tennis player. I still remember my surprise when, visiting her house in Hyderabad many years ago, I discovered that Imran and his wife Naseema were about to set off for Thiruvanthapuram in their beat-up Maruti Esteem so that Sania could participate in a tennis tournament. They couldn’t afford to fly.
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