Close to the seafront in Lebanon's Tripoli, giant curves of concrete stand testimony to dreams before the civil war, etchings of an exhibition park never finished but already cracking.

Hindu hardliners blocked intersections, threatened drivers, threw stones at buses and ordered a 12-hour strike on Thursday to successfully bar women from one of India's holiest temples for a second day.

Moscow has promised to defend Orthodox believers in Ukraine while Kiev accuses its neighbor of preparing for "religious war" after the Istanbul-based Ecumenical Patriarchate's decision to recognize the independence of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

The world organization of French-speaking nations on Friday elected Rwandan Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo as its new head despite her country's shift to English a decade ago and controversy over its rights record. 

Freddy Vainer was only four years old when he and his family were forced to flee Copenhagen to escape being deported to Nazi concentration camps, but he remembers it like it was yesterday.

At a new private museum in Lebanon, a contemporary sculpture of a mortar missile is displayed alongside millenia-old statues retrieved from the bottom of the sea.

Chinese authorities have launched a campaign against halal products in the name of fighting extremism in the capital of Xinjiang, the fractious northwest region where Muslims are facing a raft of religious restrictions.

They are among Istanbul's most iconic sights -- magnificent waterside mansions strung out along the Bosphorus as the waters of the strait dividing Europe and Asia lap almost at their front doors.

Once the preserve of the Ottoman elite and affluent foreigners working in what was Constantinople, the mansions, known as yalis, were made famous in novels and more recently through modern Turkey's hugely successful TV soap operas.

Nadia Murad survived the worst cruelties inflicted on her people, the Yazidis of Iraq, before becoming a global champion of their cause and winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

The referendum in Romania this weekend that could see the conservative country ban gay marriage underlines the largely East-West split in Europe over same-sex unions.