A 72-year-old man from a remote valley in southwestern Nepal was on Sunday declared the shortest man ever documented after being measured by Guinness World Records officials.

Chandra Bahadur Dangi stands just 54.6 centimeters (21.5 inches) tall, measurements confirmed, 5.3cm shorter than Filipino Junrey Balawing, the previous holder of the "world's shortest man" title.

Police in Nepal said they had cracked down on members of the public using cannabis at a major Hindu festival where the drug is smoked legally by thousands of holy men to honour a Hindu god.

The wandering mystics -- known as sadhus -- use an ancient legal loophole to smoke marijuana during a night of celebrations in honor of Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction, but ordinary Nepalis are not permitted to join them.

A mob burned alive a 40-year-old woman on Friday after accusing her of casting black magic spells in a remote village in southern Nepal, police said.

Dengani Mahato died after she was severely beaten, doused in kerosene and set alight for allegedly practicing witchcraft, Gopal Bhandari, a superintendent of police in Chitwan district, told Agence France Presse.

A leopard dragged away and devoured a 14-year-old girl in western Nepal in what is thought to be the fifth deadly attack by the same animal in just two months, police said on Thursday.

The youngster was cutting grass in the forest near her home in Baitadi district, on the border with India, when she was attacked by the animal, said Bishnu Bahadur Karki, a local deputy superintendent of police.

Guinness World Records experts said Thursday they are to travel to a remote valley in southwestern Nepal to measure a 72-year-old claiming to be the world's shortest man.

Chandra Bahadur Dangi is 56 centimeters tall and weighs 12 kilos he told a media conference broadcast by Nepali state television.

Nearly 7,000 people have now died from cholera in Haiti in an epidemic which has become one of the worst of recent decades, a top health official said Friday.

Jon Kim Andrus, deputy director of the Pan American Health Organization, said that as of December, on top of the deaths, the Haitian government had reported more than 520,000 cholera cases with 200 new sufferers appearing each day.

Saraswati Biswokarma sits in the dark, rearranging the threadbare cotton sheet and straw bed she is forced to sleep on before bringing her knees up to her chest with a shiver.

It is already mid-morning but she has not been allowed out of the airless brick shed where she has spent every night for the past week.

Wrapped in a maroon robe, her head shaven, Ani Choying Dolmatreads gingerly into a Kathmandu hotel, exuding the composure and serenity one might expect from a Buddhist nun.

But this 40-year-old is no ordinary devotee, for Dolma -- better known by her moniker "The Singing Nun" -- is the most unlikely of music stars, touring the world to change the lives of thousands of poverty-hit Nepali girls.

A bus has plunged off a narrow mountain road in western Nepal killing 15 people, police said Sunday, the latest in a string of deadly accidents on the country's highways

The driver lost control in thick fog on a highway on the country's western border with India, 700 kilometers (435 miles) west of Kathmandu.

A court in Nepal has convicted 19 villagers over the murder of a group of farmers during a fight over a prized aphrodisiac plant dubbed the "Himalayan Viagra", an official said Tuesday.

Seven farmers were killed in the remote northern district of Manang in June 2009 after going to forage for Yarchagumba, a rare parasitic plant that is a major source of income for many Himalayan communities.