Eideard

A group of male commuters travelling in a women-only carriage on New Delhi’s metro system were ordered to do sit-ups on the platform by the furious female passengers.

At least one carriage is reserved for women on every metro train in the Indian capital, where female residents and tourists have complained about sexual harassment on public transport for decades.

The metro has also become severely congested with the lines expanding into the suburbs over the last year and most regular carriages packed to capacity.

Police on Saturday led a crackdown of men using women’s carriages at a station in Gurgaon, a satellite development on the outskirts of Delhi, after a series of complaints – and women passengers joined in the action.

The offending commuters were made to pay a fine of 250 rupees while angry women slapped some of them and forced them to do sit-ups.

Har! That’s a genuine “Gotcha!”

Foursquare has inked a partnership with the Canadian version of Metro, the free newspaper that gets distributed on subway trains and other locations in various cities, that will give its users the ability to see local news and reviews related to a specific location they are “checking in” at using the service’s iPhone or BlackBerry app.

Metro International, a Swedish company that publishes free papers in more than 100 cities around the world, says this is the first time the location-based startup has partnered with a news organization in any country.

In Canada, the paper is in Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver and claims circulation of some 800,000. So if a Foursquare user is near a restaurant in one of those cities for which Metro has a review, that will be displayed as a choice for the user. Although the Metro release doesn’t say whether other forms of news will be available as well, the potential is there for Metro reports on fires, break-ins, celebrity sightings or other news to be provided to users of Foursquare based on their location as well…

Mark Briggs at Lost Remote makes a good point that in the long term, location-based news would be better accomplished by way of an open API and open data-sharing rather than proprietary relationships between news services and app vendors. But at least in the short term a deal like that of Foursquare/Metro could provide some interesting evidence as to what’s possible when you blend location and news (or marketing) content.

Any of our Canadian readers have a chance to try this, yet?