A schoolboy murdered a former girlfriend by battering her with a rock after he was promised a free breakfast if he carried out the killing, a jury heard.

The alleged killer, aged 16, lured Rebecca Aylward, 15, to woods near Bridgend in south Wales where he attacked her, Swansea crown court heard. To divert suspicion, he told her to tell friends she was meeting someone else. But she did not follow his directions and revealed his identity to her mother, the jury heard on Tuesday.

The boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, denies murdering Rebecca in October last year and blames his best friend — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Yet if we seek another model, one that emphasizes universal health care and educational opportunity, one that seeks to curb income inequality, we don’t have to turn to Sweden. Rather, look to the United States military.

You see, when our armed forces are not firing missiles, they live by an astonishingly liberal ethos — and it works. The military helped lead the way in racial desegregation, and even today it does more to provide equal opportunity to working-class families — especially to blacks — than just about any social program. It has been an escalator of social mobility in American society because it invests in soldiers and gives them skills and opportunities.

The United States armed forces knit together whites, blacks, Asians and Hispanics from diverse backgrounds, invests in their education and training, provides them with excellent health care and child care. And it does all this with minimal income gaps: A senior general earns about 10 times what a private makes, while, by my calculation, CEO’s at major companies earn about 300 times as much as those cleaning their offices. That’s right: the military ethos can sound pretty lefty — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The Victorian Government has promised to fix the heating at a secondary school in Melbourne’s north, after students were forced to bring blankets to school to keep warm — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Canadians will be packing more plastic in their wallets with the launch of new polymer bills that replace paper-cotton notes.

The Canadian dollar has traded above parity with the US greenback for months, and gets technologically tougher with the new plastic money designed to thwart counterfeiters.

The polypropylene substrate lasts 2.5 times longer and makes it harder to copy than the existing paper-cotton money, according to the Bank of Canada. It marks the first full-scale use of a substrate other than paper for Canada’s currency — via redwolf.newsvine.com

In another first, the store will have a 24/7 zone for customers to pick up parcels, vending machines where customers can buy stamps and packaging products as well as weigh and send parcels at any time that suits them — via redwolf.newsvine.com