A 15-year-old girl who performed at President Barack Obama's inauguration last week was shot dead in Chicago by a gunman who opened fire on a group of kids hanging out in a park, police said Wednesday.

French authorities on Wednesday charged a 32-year-old British man with the brutal killing of a mother of three in what they believe was an attempted sexual assault that went wrong.

Assailants shot dead two Yemeni policemen on Wednesday in the southern town of Daleh, triggering clashes that killed two more people including another policeman, officials said.

A gunman boarded a school bus in the southern US state of Alabama, shot and killed the driver and kidnapped a young boy, police said Wednesday.

A senior Iranian official said Wednesday that those backing "terrorist" groups are responsible for the fighting and killings in Syria, as he repeated Tehran's support of the Syrian regime.

The Syria war has reached "unprecedented levels of horror", UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said after dozens of men were killed in a grim new massacre.

Mexican authorities are investigating why a band that performed love songs was kidnapped and killed by gunmen, who dumped their bodies in a well in the drug cartel-infested north.

A motorist was to appear in court Wednesday charged with killing a husband and wife who were knocked off their tandem bicycle.

The man tasked by the United Nations with finding an end to the war in Syria warned Tuesday that the country faces "unprecedented levels of horror" and is on the verge of splintering.

French police have detained a 32-year-old British man after finding traces of his DNA at the scene of the murder of a mother of three who was stabbed to death while out jogging.

Footage shown on British television has reignited allegations that South African police did not act wholly in self-defence when they fatally shot 34 miners during an illegal pay strike last year.

Another three people have been killed in the political violence sweeping Egypt, medics said on Tuesday, pushing the death toll from five days of clashes to at least 52.

Kimberly McCarthy is set to become the first woman executed in the United States since 2010 on Tuesday after being condemned to death in Texas for murdering an elderly woman during a robbery.

A US congresswoman on Monday urged France not to release a Lebanese militant jailed in connection with the murder of a US military attache in Paris, despite his being granted parole after nearly three decades behind bars.

A court on Monday ruled that the sixth suspect in last month's deadly gang-rape of a student on a bus in New Delhi would be tried as a juvenile, meaning he will face a maximum prison term of three years.

Robert Mugabe -- who has ruled Zimbabwe since independence nearly 33 years ago -- may stay in power for another decade if he is reelected according to a new draft constitution.

After a life of crime in one of Central America's most fearsome gangs, a group of Salvadoran street toughs, some tattooed from head to toe, have now found a way out: making bread.

Thousands of people marched in Washington on Saturday to demand stronger gun control legislation, in a solemn rally backed by the US Education Secretary, the city's mayor and other top officials.

Two Tibetans in southwest China stood trial for murder on Saturday for allegedly inciting others to self-immolate, state media said, as authorities aim to crack down on this form of protest.

Gunmen killed two soldiers and snatched three more west of Baghdad on Saturday in apparent revenge attacks as mourners buried anti-government protesters that troops shot dead a day earlier.