Tens of thousands of homosexuals, transgender people, gay activists and sympathizers thronged the streets of the Israeli city of Tel Aviv on Friday for the annual Gay Pride parade.

The trappings of a dream Paris holiday -- a visit to the Louvre, cruising the Seine under the twinkling lights of the Eiffel Tower -- have been drowned under torrential rainfall this week.

The book Beirut at dawn. A bus leaves the Charles Helou station en route to Damascus. Seven passengers are on board, one of whom is a prominent Lebanese politician. Before crossing the border, the bus is accosted and derailed. All seven passengers are gunned down. A botanist studying a rare occurrence of acacias nearby witnesses the horror.

While the nation around him plunges into conspiracy theories and chaos, the botanist realizes he holds the only clue to the mystery: his injured Acacia. This sends him on a quest for answers, through a minefield of national fears and family secrets, deep into a private underworld.

A plan to replace Paris' iconic green domed newspaper kiosks with modernist "sardine can" mini-shops has sparked uproar, with more than 30,000 people signing a petition to save the ornate originals.

Heritage groups and architectural experts have reacted with fury to mayor Anne Hidalgo's push to do away with the historic design, a fixture on the streets of French capital since the 1860s.

Each time he hears of the latest deadly machete attack, Ashraful Islam can't help but think of his father's gruesome murder and fear his fellow Sufi Muslims will never be safe again in Bangladesh.

"The killings are not declining, they're getting worse. And every one reminds me what happened to my father," said the 30-year-old medical student.

A Malian jihadist will go on trial in August, set to admit to an attack on the World Heritage site of Timbuktu which triggered a global outcry, the International Criminal Court said Wednesday.

Intimate letters, personal photographs and rare manuscripts that once belonged to French writer Marcel Proust have sold at auction for 1.2 million euros ($1.3 million).

The sale at Sotheby's in Paris on Tuesday far exceeded expert estimates for the collection of between 520,000 to 740,000 euros ($600,000 to $850,000).

Gaming fans in Hong Kong have called a decision "absurd" by Japan's Nintendo to rename the popular Pokemon character Pikachu using the official language of mainland China instead of local language Cantonese.

A popular Iranian actress has found herself at the center of a dispute over feminism in the Islamic republic after cameras appeared to capture a "women power" symbol tattooed on her arm.

Taraneh Alidoosti's tattoo was seen sneaking from under her sleeve this week as she addressed reporters after returning from the Cannes Film Festival, where her latest film "The Salesman" won two awards.

The most senior lawyer at the EU's top court said Tuesday that companies may ban Muslim headscarves if they are enforcing a general prohibition on religious symbols in the workplace.