India's Bihar state has sacked 1,100 school teachers in the last five years for faking their own education qualifications, an official said Tuesday.

Bihar's government has launched an investigation into the eastern state's primary and secondary teachers to check the authenticity of their degrees, the official said.

Boeing is deciding what to do with six newly manufactured commercial airplane bodies that fell off a train in a derailment in western Montana, including three that slid down a steep riverbank, a company spokeswoman said Monday.

Experts from Boeing Co. and Spirit AeroSystems, which built the fuselages, are at the site of Thursday's derailment on the Clark Fork River about 50 miles west of Missoula, spokeswoman Dina Weiss said in a statement.

The transformative power of online crowd funding is being poured into a bowl or two of potato salad

The transformative power of online crowd funding is being poured into a bowl or two of potato salad.

More than 200 songwriters have entered a contest to change Switzerland's national anthem, organizers who want to bin the less than rousing current version said on Monday.

Lukas Niederberger, director of the Swiss Society for Public Good, said that 215 entries had submitted to replace "The Swiss Psalm", which critics liken to a weather forecast crossed with a religious hymn, given its repeated references to God and Alpine vistas.

Greek police have been left baffled by the mysterious appearance of a two-metre long crocodile spotted lounging near an artificial dam on the tourist island of Crete.

"Clearly crocodiles do not occur naturally here, so the owner probably wanted to get rid of it," a local police official told AFP Sunday. 

A small town midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco on the Pacific Coast Highway has been sold for an undisclosed price.

The San Luis Obispo Tribune reports (http://bit.ly/VwBwR3) the buyers plan to restore the one-block, 2.5-acre town of Harmony.

Germany will have to contend with black magic as well Brazil's Selecao in Tuesday's World Cup semi-final as a voodoo priest plans to curse die Mannschaft.

Brazil will be without injured superstar Neymar in Belo Horizonte, but black magic enthusiast Helio Sillman from Rio de Janeiro says his curse will hinder Joachim Loew's team in the semi-final.

A therapist pours alcohol over a patient and sets him alight -- for some in China, playing with fire is a treatment for illness.

So-called "fire therapy", which proponents claim can cure stress, indigestion, infertility and even cancer, has been used for hundreds of years and recently garnered a blaze of attention in Chinese media.

In a move that may say more about its Canadian governor Mark Carney than his attitude to quantitative easing, the Bank of England has abandoned cricket as part of its annual sports day, it said Friday.

Carney, who took charge of Britain's central bank last July, asked his 3,500 staff what they wanted to play this year and rounders, tug of war and a three-legged race topped the poll amid reports cricket was seen as too exclusive and technical.

Chinese online stores are cheekily trying to cash in on Uruguay striker Luis Suarez's notorious bite of an opponent at the World Cup by selling bottle openers with his image.

Liverpool forward Suarez was given a four month ban from football for sinking his teeth into Italy defender Giorgio Chiellini during their final group match in Brazil last month.