About a month ahead of Basant, an annual festival that marks the spring season and is celebrated by flying colorful kites, authorities on Thursday lifted a ban on kite-flying in Pakistan for a short time after almost a year.

The sport was forbidden last year following a series of deaths caused by reinforced kite strings, but the government now lifted the ban about in the eastern province of Punjab and its capital, Lahore.

In a bid to spread family planning awareness, the Muslim clerics in Pakistan have decided to distribute contraceptives in the mosques. This comes as shocking news from a conservative country where mere discussion of sex is considered a taboo.

The Muslim dominated country's birth rate was 1.86 percent and the country wants to bring it down to 1.3 percent by 2020.

A 75-year-old Indian woman was reunited with her two sons in Pakistan after 52 years. Harbans Kaur from the Indian commercial capital of Mumbai met with her sons Qaramatullah and Kudratullah last week. They were born of her first marriage to a Muslim man before the 1947 Partition India-Pakistan partition.

A delighted Harbans Kaur told a newspaper, "I tried my best to find my Muslim husband and my sons, but to no avail. When I returned to Pakistan two years ago as a pilgrim at Punja Sahib, I saw Jasi Singh of Faisalabad who was wearing a locket with Muzffarabad written on it.""Jasi said he would help me find my sons, and I gave him their photographs. Jasi called me in India one day and said a college professor had recognized the pictures, and had promised to trace my sons," she continued. "With Jasi's help, the professor found her sons in 2005, but we could only talk over the telephone. I met my sons for the first time after almost six decades here at Guru Nanak's birth anniversary", she said.

An American woman entered a "Miss Bikini" pageant in China as an unauthorized representative of Pakistan, a conservative Muslim country.

Mariyah Moten, 22, won "Best in Media" at the pageant for being the most photographed and interviewed contestant.

A government official says the Houston resident did not have permission to represent Pakistan. The country does not hold beauty contests, and many women only go out with veils covering them.

A man in Pakistan steals a railway locomotive and tries to ram it into a passenger train in an apparent suicide attack.

A man identified as Madan Lal allegedly stole the engine from a marshaling yard outside Karachi.