The election of at least 20 women to local councils in Saudi Arabia for the first time could indirectly lead to longer term reforms in discriminatory policies, activists said Monday.

They said Saturday's vote in the ultra-conservative Islamic kingdom is a step towards improving the rights of the Gulf nation's roughly 10 million females.

A Tunisian court sentenced six students to three years in jail each on charges of homosexuality in a judgment condemned by rights activists, their lawyer said on Monday.

The court in Kairouan last week handed down the maximum term under a controversial article of the criminal code that criminalizes sex between two males, Boutheina Karkni said.

The tattooed young Iranian initially sparked wonder and some envy when pictures of him with scantily-clad, heavily made-up women, often more than one at a time, went viral.

In a morally conservative country, the obvious breach of a female dress code was one thing. The compromising poses the 14 women were captured in was another.

Street artist Banksy has taken on the migrant crisis in a new mural at a migrant camp in France.

The elusive graffiti artist has depicted the late Apple guru Steve Jobs — whose biological father was from Syria — carrying a black garbage bag and an early model of the Macintosh computer.

Billions of dollars in gold and silver from an 18th century shipwreck have left Spain and former colony Colombia at odds over who rightfully owns the loot.

The disagreement is over the "San Jose," an treasure ship wreck that Colombia located recently off the coast of Cartagena de Indias, its old Caribbean port city.

Selling everything from underwear to dried fruit to teacups, tiny glass-windowed kiosks packed with goods line Moscow's network of long, gloomy pedestrian underpasses.

But now the city's government has replaced the old, haphazardly-built kiosks with new purpose-built units and is trying to turn the underpasses into smarter shopping arcades for busy Muscovites.

Jews can secure eternal salvation without converting to Christianity, senior Catholic theologians say in a report published Thursday in the latest refinement of their stance on a vexed theological issue.

Addressing a question that has long blighted relations between the two faiths, the report also unequivocally states that the Church should not actively seek to convert Jews to Christianity, echoing the stance outlined by former Pope Benedict XVI in a 2011 book.

Turkey will give the prayer houses of its Alevi community a legal status, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Thursday, in the most significant gesture yet made to the country's largest minority faith.

Alevis pray in a "Cemevi", meaning House of Gathering, which is a less formal structure than a mosque and allows men and women to mingle freely.

Muhammad Ali rebuked Donald Trump over his call to ban Muslims from entering the United States, news reports said Wednesday, as the boxing icon became just the latest high-profile name to lay into the presidential hopeful.

Ali, a Muslim, did not mention the Republican frontrunner by name, but a statement by the former heavyweight champ -- reported by NBC and ABC -- appeared directed squarely at Trump.

Welhite Naro proudly proffers his fried spiders and grilled crickets along with a somewhat less exotic dish of millet and squash -- a small sample of the disappearing delicacies of India's remote northeast.

Naro is a farmer from Nagaland, one of the eight states that make up northeast India -- an area connected to the rest of the country by only a narrow sliver of land and with its own distinct cultural and culinary traditions.