The United Nations launched Wednesday in Lebanon the 16 Days of Activism, part of a global campaign aimed at promoting action to end violence against women and girls and to empower them.

During visits to a women's center in the Palestinian refugee camp of Bourj al-Barajneh and later to a center in Choueifat, Sigrid Kaag, the United Nations Special Coordinator for Lebanon, emphasized the importance of the empowerment of women and girls through education, as one of “the pathways to ensure greater protection from violence.”

Police in Greece on Wednesday said they had arrested a 36-year-old Cuban suspected of masterminding a massive art heist at the Havana National Museum of Fine Arts.

A police statement said the man was arrested on Monday in Koropi, a rural area near Athens, in the home of a 40-year-old Greek.

Late Russian leader Boris Yeltsin's "nuclear button" briefcase went on display Wednesday as a major new museum devoted to the legacy of Russia's first president opened in the Urals.

Russian President Vladimir Putin -- whom an ailing Yeltsin anointed as his heir on New Year's Eve 1999 with the words "Take care of Russia" -- unveiled the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center in the former leader's home city of Yekaterinburg in the Ural mountains.

Chinese state-run media called Wednesday for children born outside the country's one-child policy to be given crucial household registration documents, an issue that has left as many as 13 million in legal limbo.

A "hukou" registration is essential in China to obtain basic social services such as schooling, healthcare and housing.

France's leading Muslim body said Tuesday it would create a permit to preach for imams in a bid to root out extremists, as well as a new religious body to fight back against jihadist propaganda.

Anouar Kbibech, president of the French Council for the Muslim Religion (CFCM), said the country's imams should be given a certificate -- "like a driving license" -- that ensured they promoted a "tolerant and open Islam."

A Chinese lesbian on Tuesday took the government to court over textbooks describing homosexuality as a "psychological disorder", a landmark case in a country where discrimination remains common.

Qiu Bai, 21, a student at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, brought the action against the ministry of education, demanding that it give her details of how it approved materials and how they could be changed.

A haunting peal reminiscent of the Scottish Highlands reverberates across Pakistan's inhospitable Cholistan desert as the nation's first camel-mounted military bagpipe band marches, noses in the air.

With scarlet and gold uniforms in sharp contrast to the dichromatic landscape of beige and green, the camels' tails switch in perfect rhythm.

Egypt said Monday it will conduct more tests this week in search of a hidden chamber in King Tutankhamun's tomb that a British archaeologist believes may be the burial place of Queen Nefertiti.

Archaeologists have never discovered the mummy of the legendary beauty, but renowned British archaeologist Nicholas Reeves said in a recent study that her tomb could be in a secret chamber adjoining Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of Kings in Luxor in southern Egypt.

President Ollanta Humala on Sunday issued legal measures aimed at ending violence against women, arguing that full respect for them was essential for a truly democratic society.

In a ceremony before hundreds of women, Humala, with his wife Nadine Heredia by his side, asked Peruvians to end cultural practices that often condone domestic violence against women.

Some of the world's most expensive and rarely seen modern art, including works by the Americans Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, went on display Saturday in a major exhibition in Iran.

They are part of a collection bought in the 1970s by dealers acting for Farah, the wife of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who fled into exile in 1979, heralding the country's Islamic revolution later that year.