Some days there is no train at all crossing the bridge to Uzbekistan, yawns a customs officer in Hairatan, formerly a teeming Silk Road border town whose decline is a barometer of economic depression in Afghanistan's north.

"The camel driver is at work; the caravan is being readied," proclaimed the mystic poet Rumi, born in Balkh province, where Hairatan is located and through which passes one of the routes of the ancient trade network. "He asks why we travelers are asleep."

Christie's auction house has been fined £3,250 ($4,750, 4,270 euros) for selling a piece of elephant ivory without the correct documentation, London police said Tuesday.

The silver-mounted tusk, put up for auction last year, did not have the right documentation under wildlife protection laws, a police statement said.

In an international battle stretching from Native American lands in the American West to the auction houses of Paris, two tribes on Tuesday renewed a years-long campaign to prevent the sale of sacred objects.

The Acoma Pueblo Nation located in New Mexico and The Hoopa Valley Tribal Nation of California have announced their opposition to a scheduled sale next week of close to 500 artifacts at Paris' EVE auction house.

A Malian jihadist will seek forgiveness from his people for attacking the world heritage site of Timbuktu when he pleads guilty at an unprecedented case before an international war crimes court, his lawyer said Tuesday.

The ashes of the late Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez will be laid to rest near his seaside home in Colombia on Sunday.

The bestselling author of the modern classic "One Hundred Years of Solitude" died in April 2014 in his adopted home of Mexico at the age of 87.

Pope Francis came under fire Friday after meeting Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, the Lyon archbishop who is suspected of covering up for a pedophile priest in a scandal that has rocked the Church in France.

A Russian court on Thursday convicted artist Pyotr Pavlensky of vandalism for a 2014 performance called "Freedom" inspired by Ukraine's anti-government protests.

A gold ring and necklace hidden by an Auschwitz prisoner in a false-bottomed mug for fear of looting by German Nazis has been discovered at site of the death camp, the Auschwitz museum said Thursday.

More than 70 years after the liberation of the World War II camp in occupied Poland, staff discovered the jewelery in a rusting enamel mug, one of thousands of pieces of kitchenware now on display at the museum.

Sitting on a red and green carpet inside a mosque in a suburb of Washington, Nabill Abdulle describes an invisible force. You can't see it, he says, but "it's there."

Islamophobia haunts the Muslims of Lanham, Maryland -- 30 minutes north of the U.S. capital -- as the country's divisive election campaign fuels fears already heightened by Islamic State group attacks in Brussels and Paris.

Russian performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky, who is on trial for setting fire to the security service headquarters in a protest, said Tuesday that guards convoying him from court had beaten him, cracking his rib.