Global Round-up

Cultural rows in Spain

A Moroccan teenager whose mother wanted to sell her into marriage has been placed under the protection of social services in the southern region of Andalusia. The mother of the 15-year-old girl planned to sell her to a man living in Morocco, an official said.

Spanish education and culture minister Pilar del Castillo described the teenager's plight as "terrible" and said a greater effort was needed to ensure immigrants "share the civic values" of Spaniards.

The story follows controversy over a Muslim father's insistence that his daughter wear a headscarf to school in Madrid. Authorities finally allowed the 13-year-old girl to go to school with her head covered after her father kept her out for five months.

US drink stats too high

After several news organisations reported a finding that underage drinkers consumed a quarter of US alcohol, the antidrinking organisation that issued the finding admitted it had not applied the usual statistical techniques in deriving that number, which would then have been far smaller.

Indeed, the government agency on whose data the finding was based said that by its own analysis, the actual figure for the proportion of alcohol consumed by teenagers is 11.4 percent.

The study, "Teen Tipplers", found that 31 per cent of second-level students engaged in regular "binge drinking".