World

The daily trip to high school was expensive, long and eventually, too much for Indian teenager Nahid Farzana, who decided she was going to drop out. Then, the state government gave her a bicycle.

Two years later, she is about to graduate from high school and wants to be a teacher.

The eastern state of Bihar has been so successful at keeping teenage girls in school, the bike give-aways have spread to neighbouring states. Now the Indian government wants to expand it across the country in hopes it might help improve female literacy — via redwolf.newsvine.com

At the age of 65, Diane Pieknik decides to play ice hockey for the first time and joins a women’s 18 and over hockey league

Three children whose mother was stabbed to death by their abusive father in front of hundreds of people at the Adelaide Convention Centre have spoken of their shattered lives.

Zioalloh Abrahimzadeh is awaiting sentencing for the murder of his estranged wife Zahra in March 2010.

He stabbed her repeatedly in front of about 300 people at a Persian new year festival because he felt she had dishonoured him by fleeing his abuse.

The family’s three children testified against their father at trial, before he changed his plea to guilty.

Now they have read tearful statements to the South Australian Supreme Court — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Tunnelling work is about to begin on a grand scale in London as the £16bn Crossrail project gets set to build 26 miles (42km) of tunnels beneath the capital.

The first of eight highly specialised Tunnel Boring Machines (TBM), which each weigh nearly 1,000 tonnes, is being positioned at Royal Oak in west London. From here it will begin its slow journey east, as it carves out a new east-west underground link. The scheme is currently the largest civil engineering project in Europe — via redwolf.newsvine.com

A month ago, while I was camping out in a hotel in Colorado Springs, a copy of USA TODAY slid under our hotel door in the night. A question — does anyone actually read that thing? I look at the front page and all I can see is Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit… in turgid American journalese. The so-called stories on the front page are not news; they’re perfectly shaped pieces of text that outwardly conform to the aesthetic of modern American journalism while actually containing nothing of any significance — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Five taxi-drivers have been shot dead in the city of Monterrey in northern Mexico, the authorities say.

Gunmen with assault rifles fired on the drivers as they waited for passengers at a taxi-rank in the mid-morning.

The motive for the attack is not known, but it is thought they may have been targeted by criminal gangs who extort money from local businesses — via redwolf.newsvine.com

A Missouri teenager who told authorities she wanted to know what it felt like to kill has pleaded guilty to murder, telling a judge that she strangled a nine-year-old neighbour with her hands, stabbed her in the chest and cut her throat with a knife.

Alyssa Bustamante pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and armed criminal action in the 21 October 2009, killing of Elizabeth Olten in St Martins, a rural town just west of Jefferson City. The plea avoids a trial that had been scheduled to start later this month.

At Tuesday’s hearing, Bustamante looked down, her long brown hair covering her eyes, as the judge read out the amended charges and asked her if she understood she was giving up her right to a trial. She replied, yes — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Organised crime has tightened its grip on the Italian economy during the economic crisis, making the Mafia the country’s biggest bank and squeezing the life out of thousands of small firms, according to a report.

Extortionate lending by criminal groups had become a national emergency“, said the report by anti-crime group SOS Impresa, released overnight.

Organised crime now generated annual turnover of about 140 billion euros ($175 billion) and profits of more than 100 billion euros, it added — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Médecins sans Frontières says two of its employees in Mogadishu — a Belgian and an Indonesian — have been killed in gunfire that occurred in one of its offices.

The aid group said the exact circumstances of the gunfire on Thursday in Somalia’s capital were not immediately clear. However, a security guard, Ahmed Ali, said a disgruntled former employee of MSF, a Somali dismissed the day before, had returned and opened fire.

The aid group identified the victims as Philippe Havet, 53, of Belgium, and Andrias Karel Keiluhu, 44, an Indonesian doctor known as Kace — via redwolf.newsvine.com